The Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that the case of a man who died by suicide in Limestone Correctional Facility will remain in the Montgomery County court system.

This decision comes in response to the Montgomery Circuit Court previously granting the defendants’ motion to move the case to Limestone County courts, where the incident took place.

From 2017 to 2018, Timothy John Chumney was undergoing regular mental health evaluations after he was beaten and raped by a group of six inmates a few days into his six-year sentence at Easterling Correctional Facility, court documents state.

Chumney was transferred to Limestone County Correctional Facility in Feb. 2018 and was diagnosed with “adjustment disorder with anxiety” by healthcare providers at the facility, according to court records.

He was scheduled for monthly health appointments.

Wexford began providing health-care services to Alabama’s correctional facilities on April 1, 2018.

Those services included monitoring, and conducting risk assessments of, inmates with suicidal behavior, court documents say.

During April and May of 2018, it was noted that Chumney was paranoid about attacks from other inmates and was having suicidal thoughts.

Nurse practitioner Deora Johnson and counselor Shari Barfield reported Chumney as a moderate suicide risk and ordered him to undergo mental-health observations with suicide precautions.

“On May 8, 2018, Johnson and Barfield placed Chumney on suicide watch but later changed their minds and placed Chumney in mental health observation, instead,” court documents read.

“Three days after Chumney was initially placed on suicide watch, Johnson discharged Chumney from mental health observation and sent him back into the general population despite his remaining adamant that he would be harmed by other inmates.”

“Although discharging a patient requires a suicide assessment of the patient, no one performed an assessment on Chumney,” it continues.

“The following day, Chumney hung himself in his cell.”

Chumney hanged himself using a bed sheet in his segregation cell.

Andrew J. Scarborough, the administrator of Chumney’s estate, filed a complaint alleging negligence in Montgomery Circuit Court on May 7, 2020.

The complaint names Wexford, Johnson, and Barfield, and three fictitiously named parties as defendants.

Last year, the defendants filed a motion to have the case moved to Limestone County Circuit Court, claiming that Montgomery County was an “improper venue.”

In their decision, the court states that “the Montgomery Circuit Court exceeded its discretion when it granted the defendants’ motion to transfer the action to the Limestone Circuit Court roughly four years after the action was commenced.”

The court says that this was too long of a period for the issue of venue to be raised in the case, and states that the case will be heard in Montgomery County because it deals with a state-owned prison.

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson in 2019 used the stories of Chumney and 14 other men in a 210-page ruling that found the state’s prison system fails to adequately prevent inmate suicides.

Thompson ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to implement specific steps to address what he called “severe and systemic inadequacies.”

“The risk of suicide is so severe and imminent that the court must redress it immediately,” Thompson wrote.