From NYLJ:
A judge has refused to order a state commission that monitors conditions at county jails to rewrite its final report on the suicide of an inmate at the behest of Ontario County officials who argued, in part, that the findings would make it harder to defend themselves against a civil suit filed by the prisoner’s widow.
The Commission of Correction acted within the powers given it by state law when it adopted the report on the 2009 suicide of Bruce Morgan in the Ontario County Correctional Facility in Canandaigua, Acting Supreme Court Justice Richard Platkin in Albany.
The commission’s Medical Review Board is charged by law with investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of any inmate at a correctional facility in New York state and to make recommendations, when appropriate, “to prevent the recurrence of such deaths to the commission and the administrator of the appropriate correctional facility.”
Ontario County officials had been seeking since the commission sent them a preliminary report on Morgan’s suicide in September 2010 to have changes made to the findings, which the county said in its complaint were “invalid and unenforceable.”
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