A coalition of civil rights groups is suing the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, claiming that the agency failed to properly assess jail detainees’ suicide risk, aggravated their mental health conditions with punitive treatment and isolation, then neglected to closely monitor them, therefore allowing several suicides and many more instances of attempted self-harm.

The complaint was filed in federal court Tuesday on behalf of the Harford County branch of the NAACP and Charles Morris, a former detainee who attempted to kill himself in the detention center and nearly died. A team of attorneys from the ACLU of Maryland, Mayer Brown LLP and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs is representing Morris and the NAACP.

The attorneys accuse Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler and his detention center warden of a “lethal pattern and practice of deliberate indifference” to jail suicides, including a “malign insistence on maintaining practices that exacerbate — and even encourage — the risk of suicide attempts" and a “refusal to take rudimentary precautions.” A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office declined to comment.

The lawsuit builds on a 2024 investigation by The Baltimore Banner that focused on the jail’s abnormally high suicide rate. Using public records, newly discovered witnesses, and expert interviews, The Banner identified inconsistencies in official accounts of the suicides and several practices that could be contributing to them, primarily the placement of seemingly high-risk individuals in isolation. During the first few days of incarceration — known to be the riskiest period for suicide — detainees were housed alone in cells with unnecessary bunk beds that they repeatedly used as makeshift gallows, the investigation found.

The coalition’s lawsuit identifies those factors and others in the same suicides examined by The Banner, as well as many more attempted suicides, including that of Morris, who was placed in 23-hour isolation in August 2024 despite suffering from depression and bipolar disorder, and despite showing clear warning signs of being in an acute mental health crisis.

The attorneys say the sheriff’s office’s practices violate the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of due process, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, as well as provisions of the Maryland state constitution.

The lawsuit requests that a federal judge require the sheriff’s office to reform its detention center practices and award damages for the injuries suffered by Morris.

Sonia Kumar, one of the attorneys on the case, told The Banner in a statement that “so much suffering could have been avoided if jail officials had just asked what they could do to save lives instead of their reflexive, blanket denials that anything is wrong.”

“They’ve seemed more focused on the jail’s reputation than the pattern right in front of them or the common-sense changes — like better screening, less isolation, and limiting use of those dangerous bunks — that would actually help," Kumar said.

Red flags seemingly ignored

Morris had entered the jail after a stint at a residential substance use treatment center and after the recent death of his mother, who was his long-term caregiver, according to the lawsuit.

He warned staff that he had stopped taking his psychiatric medications prior to his arrest, the lawsuit says. Jail staff noted that he was “visibly depressed” and “tearful,” among other red flags that came up during his screening, the lawsuit adds. But Morris was not placed in special housing or under monitoring of any kind, in direct violation of the detention center’s own policies, according to the lawsuit.

Instead, the lawsuit says, Morris was placed in isolation, where he fashioned a noose from his pants, attached it to his upper bunk, stood on the lower bunk and jumped off.

“As the evening progressed, Mr. Morris was increasingly despondent,” the lawsuit says. “Like so many before him, Mr. Morris began to believe his only option was to end his life. Also like so many before him, he turned to the obvious protrusion — the wholly unnecessary bunk bed in a cell where he was alone — as his means of doing so.”

Morris was hanging for “several minutes” and nearly died at the detention center, having no pulse by the time he was discovered by a sheriff’s deputy who then called a “Code Blue” for help, the lawsuit says. Taken to a hospital, Morris was sedated, placed in a coma and intubated for three days due to his injuries, according to the lawsuit.

But as Morris lay comatose — shackled to a hospital bed under the guard of two sheriff’s deputies — the jail’s warden, Daniel Galbraith, “improperly tried to hide Mr. Morris’s near-death from his sister and next-of-kin, Devora Jones, a longtime Harford NAACP member who is also a correctional nurse,” the lawsuit says.

“Egregiously, the warden deliberately refused to contact Ms. Jones, repeatedly claiming to hospital staff, without any reasonable justification, that merely notifying the family of Mr. Morris’s grave medical condition would somehow risk the safety of his staff,” the lawsuit says.

Attorneys for Morris claim that Galbraith’s refusal to notify the family violated state law, and that the warden “went so far in his effort to cover up Mr. Morris’s suicide attempt as to unlawfully involve himself in medical consents.”

“When the hospital asked who would make medical decisions for Mr. Morris, the warden falsely claimed that, instead of Mr. Morris’s actual next of kin, he was the decision-maker for medical consents, flouting fundamental constitutional and Maryland law,” the lawsuit says.

Following the suicide attempt, the sheriff’s office, just months after The Banner’s investigation into its apparent suicide prevention failures was published, issued a press release celebrating the agency’s success in “saving” Morris’ life and “falsely claiming that Mr. Morris ‘did not present any indications of trying to harm himself,’” the lawsuit says.

‘Pattern and practice’

In addition to Morris’ case, the complaint lists commonalities between the suicides and attempted suicides, including “deficient” screening for at-risk people and inadequate monitoring of them to make sure they did not self-harm, even for those who were flagged as needing medical observation.

The lawsuit cites, but does not name, several people who showed clear warning signs such as tying objects to the bars of their cells or repeatedly asking to speak with mental health staff, and even one person, referred to as “Mr. E,” who drew “graphic pictures of a figure being hung from a tree and posted them on his cell door.”

“Yet, somehow, HCDC staff had failed to adequately identify Mr. E as at risk — despite the many warning signs, mental health staff claimed to investigators that he ‘showed no signs’ of suicide risk,” the lawsuit says.

In addition to missed warning signs, the lawsuit says jail staff’s responses to attempted suicides were “degrading, isolative and punitive.”

Attempting to prevent self-harm, jail staff routinely “strip people of their clothing, pinning them down and literally cutting the clothing from their bodies or forcing them to undress in front of multiple officials,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also details how those who are placed on special observation due to suicide risk are sometimes left with “nothing but a mattress,” denied “any human contact” while in solitary confinement, and monitored only by video.

Meanwhile, jail staff “in some instances, handcuff or even strap suicidal people into restraint chairs that completely immobilize them.”

The lawsuit concludes that the detention center’s suicide rate, which The Banner found was more than five times that of local jails across the country, is “no accident, given the cascading impact of its deficient practices.”

“Jail officials’ reckless conduct and deliberate indifference create the perfect storm for self-harm,” the lawsuit says.