BATON ROUGE, La. (Legal Newsline) – A federal judge has tossed a lawsuit against Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety & Corrections brought by a prison guard who says she was raped because the doors at her facility didn’t work.
The attorney for Deshunta Miller filed a lacking response to Louisiana’s motion to dismiss, Judge John deGravelles wrote June 9. He is allowing him to try to file an amended complaint.
Louisiana and other defendants had argued Miller couldn’t make due process claims against them and that Workers’ Compensation was the proper system to go through to compensate her for any injuries. Miller's lawyer Travis Turner filed a three-page response.
“In response, Plaintiffs merely provide a page of hornbook law on the Rule 12(b)(6) standard, a paragraph about qualified immunity generally, and then the following, ‘For the foregoing reasons and all the others discussed in Plaintiff’s verified petition, the present Motion to Dismiss should be denied,’” deGravelles wrote.
“The Court finds that such a barebones, skeletal response is exactly the type of opposition which supports a finding of waiver… As a result, Plaintiff’s claims will be dismissed.”
According to Miller’s lawsuit, she was raped by an inmate on July 17, 2020, while she was performing her job duties.
The suit states that the prison security tape shows inmate Erick Dehart “entering (Miller’s work) area and grabbing her from behind with some type of weapon in his hand.”
The suit alleges that cell locks where she worked were defective, as was the beeper that could have aided in her attack.
Miller is under the care of a counselor “as a result of the severe emotional distress, and emotional physical trauma, stress and distress resulting from the rape.”
Miller is also alleging staff at Elayn Hunt was aware of a lack of response to employee reports of inappropriate inmate behavior. The DPSC said the Workers’ Compensation system is the exclusive remedy for her workplace injuries – not civil court.
“The Louisiana Supreme Court has addressed complaints strikingly similar to this one, specifically whether the law allows an injured employee to pursue his employer in tort on the basis that the employer knowingly failed to provide employee with a safe place to work,” the motion to dismiss says.
The motion cited Adams v. Time Saver Stores, which says “failure to maintain safe conditions in the workplace may give rise to conditions ‘which, at most, could be said to have made the occurrence of an accident likely, but the circumstances fall short of indicating that injury to plaintiff was inevitable or substantially certain to occur.’”