Date of Offense
Statement
Lacey Handjis, a 37-year-old mother, was placed in the Adams County Jail under a civil commitment order meant to secure her mental health treatment. She was not facing any criminal charges. Less than 24 hours after being booked and placed in a padded cell, she was found unresponsive and deceased by jail staff.
Her death became a prominent example in statewide discussions and investigative reports (such as those by Mississippi Today and ProPublica) regarding Mississippi's practice of jailing individuals undergoing the civil commitment process without criminal charges, often due to a lack of available psychiatric beds.
Under the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals held in civil custody have a constitutional right to receive adequate medical and psychiatric care.
Jail staff and administrators exhibited "deliberate indifference"—meaning they were aware Handjis was experiencing an acute mental health crisis and placed her in a padded isolation cell rather than providing immediate, qualified emergency medical or psychiatric treatment.
As Sheriff Patten himself publicly noted, jailers are not trained psychiatric nurses. Legal advocates argue that putting a person in severe psychiatric distress into a stripped, padded jail cell without medical intervention inherently violates their right to basic medical care.
Detainees who have not been convicted of a crime cannot be subjected to conditions of confinement that amount to "punishment." Handjis was locked in a padded cell inside a facility that had been heavily criticized for its infrastructure.
In the year before Handjis’s death, the advocacy group Disability Rights Mississippi officially notified Adams County that the jail conditions were "deplorable and inhumane for any individual." Holding a non-criminal, civilly committed individual in an environment already documented as structurally deficient and inhumane constitutes a violation of due process rights.
The civil rights claims also extend into statutory violations, specifically Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits public entities from discriminating against or denying proper services to individuals with disabilities.
Civil rights attorneys argue that Mississippi's systemic practice of using jails as holding pens for civil commitments effectively punishes individuals for having a severe mental illness. Because the county failed to provide a safe, therapeutic crisis stabilization environment and instead processed her through the punitive mechanisms of a jail, it violated her rights under the ADA.
The US Citizen Reporters are a group of public and private defense advocates that scour the internet for documented incidents of police misconduct that have eluded accountability.
