When Dejour Palmer was hospitalized during his recent incarceration at the Allegheny County Jail, his lawyer and family were left in the dark.
After a June 11 hearing at which a judge dropped the charges against Palmer, his family was expecting his release within 72 hours. Instead, they didn’t hear from him for a week.
“I started getting calls from his family members saying, ‘Do you know what’s going on with him? He hasn’t called. He usually calls every night, and we haven’t heard from him,’” Palmer’s lawyer Aaron Sontz tells Pittsburgh City Paper. Palmer’s lawyer and family saw on his court docket that he was no longer in the custody of the jail.
“I started looking into it, and nobody would give me any information. The jail wouldn’t tell me where he was,” Sontz says.
Sontz learned that Palmer had been sent to an outside hospital and was in the custody of the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department.
“It just started getting more and more absurd as we tried to just get some information about him, and the sheriffs [were] just adamant in not giving us any information, and it just sort of snowballed from there,” Sontz says.
Palmer says that he had been due to see a doctor about his sickle cell anemia on the day of his arrest.
“I was telling [the jail] since I got in there, I’m like, ‘Hey, I’ve been in crisis. I was actually on my way to the hospital before you guys came and arrested me. I need treated,’” Palmer says. He says jail medical staff told him he didn’t need to go to the hospital.
When a judge dismissed the charges holding him at the jail, Palmer expected to be released, but, instead, he was finally transported to the hospital.
Palmer says he asked correctional officers to contact his mother to inform her about what was going on. The jail, in accordance with its family notification policy, did not notify Palmer’s emergency contact. Once he was admitted to the hospital, the sheriff’s department assumed custody of Palmer, which is jail policy. Palmer says he made “countless” requests to the sheriffs who were guarding him that someone notify his family that he was in the hospital. No one did.
Allegheny County Jail policy is not to notify an incarcerated individual’s emergency contact of their admission to the hospital “unless the individual is determined to have sustained a life-threatening injury or is to be hospitalized for a serious critical illness,” according to jail spokesperson Jesse Geleynse.
This policy led to significant hardship for Palmer and his family, who didn’t know where Palmer was or what condition he was in.
Being unable to communicate with his family during his health crisis was very difficult for him, Palmer says, “Especially [on] Father’s Day, because I have a 6-year-old, and then I have a going-on-2-year-old, and my main thing was like, ‘Can I at least just call my daughters and just talk to them?’ And they’re like, ‘No, we can’t allow that.’ So that was very hard for me, because I know everybody was worried sick.”
Meanwhile, Sontz was working with the county judicial system to be permitted to talk to his client.
“I contacted a judge, explained the situation, asked if the judge would be willing to sign an order, just real simple language, that the Allegheny County Sheriffs shall grant me, his attorney, access to my client to the same extent that I would have access to him if he were in the Allegheny County Jail. So the judge signed it,” Sontz says.
Sontz says he presented the order to the sheriff’s office, and later got a call from them saying that the President Judge Susan Evashaki DiLucente had canceled that order. Sontz says the sheriff’s department told him they could not share any information about Palmer or allow Palmer to meet with his attorney for security reasons.
“Their concern for security does not trump my client’s constitutional rights. I mean, the whole purpose of the Constitution is to prevent the government from violating certain rights in the name of security concerns,” Sontz says.
Geleynse told CP that an attorney visit for an incarcerated person in the hospital requires a court order from a Common Pleas judge. It is not clear why the court order Sontz obtained was canceled by the president judge.
Sontz was eventually able to get Palmer released from the custody of the sheriff’s department through an intervention by the District Attorney’s office.
“I think the sheriffs and the jail both made the situation a lot worse by simply not giving anybody any information. Had they simply told us, what his status was, that could have alleviated a lot of concern,” Sontz says.
Tanisha Long, a community organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center, tells CP that Palmer’s situation is an unfortunately common one.
“Anytime someone who is incarcerated [at ACJ] goes to the hospital, our first notification is from other incarcerated people. We don’t find out from the jail. The attorney is not notified,” Long says.
This is problematic, Long says, because for an incarcerated person to end up in an outside hospital, their health situation must be serious.
“Anytime someone is leaving the jail and has to go to the hospital, it is likely very serious. The jail has their own in-house medical care, so, if it’s a situation where the jail is acknowledging that they are not equipped to handle this, then that person’s family needs to be notified,” Long says.
It’s especially important that incarcerated people have someone who can advocate on their behalf during their hospitalization, Long argues.
“It’s actually kind of terrifying when you think about it, because what if this person doesn’t have a living will? What if this person is DNR? What if this person has a medical history that the jail is not aware of? What if this person has allergies or anything like that?” Long says. “They may ask these questions during intake, but if the jail and the hospital are not communicating, that person has zero advocates, especially if that person is in a situation where they are nonverbal or where they may not be medically aware.”
Concepts such as “serious critical illness,” which the jail uses as the threshold for family notification, are vague, Long argues, and have not been formally defined by the jail or the Jail Oversight Board.
The issue of family notification came up at the July Jail Oversight Board meeting, at which board member Bethany Hallam expressed support for loosening the restrictions on notifying incarcerated people’s families of their hospitalization.
“What I have seen as a board member, repeatedly over the years, is families are getting information. They’re getting information from other incarcerated people or other sources in the jail, and that information is not always accurate and that has led to a lot of concern for their loved one who is in the jail,” Hallam says.
Chief Deputy Warden Lee Estock repeatedly stated that the jail will only notify family members if their incarcerated loved one’s medical situation is “life threatening,” as determined by the medical provider.
Oversight board member Rob Perkins suggested the board discuss possible adjustments to the policy in their health services subcommittee. Those meetings are not open to the public.
Sontz says he hopes that the jail changes their policy.
“Family should not be kept in the dark for a week, only knowing that their family member’s in the hospital, without having any other information,” Sontz says. “I mean, imagine being in that position, knowing that [your relative is] in the hospital, and his condition is critical enough that he’s been in the hospital for a week, without any information. So the rules need to change.”
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2025.
