Accountability when jails and prisons ignore serious medical needs.

People don’t surrender their right to basic medical care when they’re arrested or incarcerated. Yet preventable injuries, overdoses, suicides, assaults, and deaths happen behind bars every day because symptoms are ignored, care is delayed, or safety protocols are not followed. Survivors face lifelong harm. Families are left without answers.

At McEldrew Purtell, we move quickly to secure evidence, challenge official narratives, and hold agencies, private medical contractors, and individual actors accountable. Our goal is twofold: justice for your family and pressure for reforms that prevent the next tragedy.

How these failures happen and how we prove them.

In-custody medical neglect is usually a chain of preventable failures, not a single mistake. We build the record that shows where systems broke down:

• Timeline reconstruction: minute-by-minute mapping of symptoms, help requests, rounds, and response times
• Evidence preservation: medical charts, MARs, sick-call slips, watch/round logs, incident reports, radio traffic, bodycam & fixed cameras
• Policy & contractor review: written policies, training materials, staffing rosters, vendor contracts, audits
• Witness development: cellmates, line officers, nurses, transport/EMS, outside hospital staff
• Independent experts: correctional medicine, emergency medicine, psychiatry, toxicology, pathology, use-of-force, jail operations