This news story was published in December but I am first seeing it now. Paul Blume reported:
A Minneapolis man sentenced to 30 years in prison on Thursday for a brutal stabbing death earlier this year also filed a lawsuit claiming the Hennepin County Jail violated his medical privacy rights while in custody.
A jury found Derek Leake guilty of second-degree murder in October for the slaying of Bobby Commodore on board a Metro Transit bus in Uptown on April 24. Leake has an extremely troubled past as a registered violent offender for prior convictions and will soon head back to prison.
[…]
As he prepares to leave Hennepin County jail for the state prison system, Leake raised concerns about inmate privacy violations that allegedly occurred while being locked up. He filed a lawsuit on his own without an attorney in December. Legal experts, who have read his civil complaint, told FOX 9 his allegations of jailhouse medical privacy violations warrant some attention.
Leake claims in the court filing that he and other inmates have had their medical privacy rights, or what’s known as HIPAA, violated in the downtown Minneapolis lock-up. He is asking for $25,000 in damages.
Read more at Fox9. As was pointed out by an attorney interviewed for the story, there is a good chance the lawsuit will be dismissed (because even if he is right about HIPAA violations, there is no private cause of action under HIPAA), but if he reframes his claims in terms of the state’s medical privacy laws, he might have a winnable case.