Prisoner Denied Anti-Seizure Meds Wins $12 Million Verdict

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A prisoner who called out for his anti-seizure medication for days but was not given them by prison medical providers has won a $12 million jury verdict.

Ray Fox was in an Illinois state prison in 2007 when he suffered a brain aneurysm. His mother, Rose, now cares for her 50-year-old son around-the-clock.

His family filed a lawsuit claiming that the aneurysm was caused by negligent medical care in prison.

“You trust the system to take care of your loved ones and then they abuse them,” Rose said. “And that’s terrible.  What happened to Ray should never happen.”

During the week-long trial, lawyers for the medical providers denied that Fox’s seizures had caused his aneurysm.

But Fox’s attorney, Michael Kanovitz of the law firm Loevy & Loevy, argued that prisoners are not seen as human beings by Stateville prison personnel.

Attorney Michael Kanovitz

“It’s about the psychology of not seeing the human portion of the people that are incarcerated for any number of reasons,” he said. “Most people, if they break a law and they have to go to prison, they are there to pay their debt to society. It is not right to injure them in a way that will follow them for the rest of their life.”

A Chicago jury agreed, awarding Fox $12 million against two prison medical technicians, David Barnes and Michael Borkowski, whose job was to give prisoners their medication. Other parties that were named in the lawsuit settled out of court before trial.

Fox’s daughter, Trisha, said that her father’s current condition makes it hard for him to walk or go to the bathroom and he sometimes pounds his chest uncontrollably and gets aggressive.