By Bryan Denson
The Oregonian
PORTLAND — Oregon’s attorney general admits the state prison system failed to protect a prisoner who was allegedly beaten to death by a white supremacist inside the state’s biggest prison in 2012.
Negligence by the Department of Corrections played a “substantial factor” in the physical injuries and death of Michael Clarence Hagen, a 28-year-old inmate at Snake River Correctional Institution, according to the state’s reply to a $7.5 million lawsuit filed by Hagen’s widow.
“The state has acknowledged that their actions caused his death and he would still be alive today if they had followed the procedures in place or had adequate policies to prevent this from happening,” said Portland lawyer Dennis Steinman, who represents Tiffany Hagen.
Department of Justice lawyers, answering the lawsuit in Malheur County, wrote that they seek a jury trial and that Hagen’s widow seeks damages beyond what the Oregon Tort Claims Act allows.
They declined through a spokeswoman on Tuesday to comment directly on their response to the lawsuit.
Steinman noted that other deaths in Oregon’s prisons might also have been avoided, despite rampant violence behind bars, had the Oregon Department of Corrections instituted policies that protected prisoners targeted by other inmates.
Since 2008, prisoners at Snake River have killed three fellow inmates.
“The DOC has allowed this systemic problem to continue by turning a blind eye and failing to institute polices to protect prisoners throughout the state,” Steinman wrote in his amended complaint.
Hagen was beaten and stomped on the morning of Feb. 2, 2012, less than two hours after he checked into his new cell block, the lawsuit alleges. He died of his wounds the next day at a hospital in Boise.
Authorities sent Hagen to prison in July 2010 for a brutal robbery. He bound, gagged and beat a female clerk with a baton at a Portland check-cashing store. But by the time he reached the prison known as SRCI, he wanted to serve his time and put the past behind him.
Inside the sprawling prison complex – among more than 3,000 inmates who tend to subdivide into racial and ethnic groups – Hagen was targeted by a white prison gang for refusing to serve as their tattoo artist, Steinman said.
Hagen got into a fight with one of the suspected gang members and was sent to a disciplinary housing unit known in prison lingo as “the hole” for 120 days. There he learned that white supremacists wanted him “taken out,” according to the lawsuit.
When Hagen complained to prison officials that his life was in danger, they agreed to transfer him to another prison. An intelligence officer named Michael Foley phoned staffers in the Disciplinary Segregation Unit to tell them Hagen was being transferred and that he was not to be returned to the general population.
The state’s answer to the lawsuit acknowledges that Hagen notified prison officials that he was fearful of reprisals by suspected white supremacists, including a prisoner named Terry Lapich.
For reasons not yet explained, Hagen was released from the hole and put in a cell with none other than Lapich. The two officers accused of causing that foul up – John Gillum and Donald Harris – have been named as defendants in a federal lawsuit filed by Tiffany Hagen.
On the morning of Feb. 2, 2012, Hagen was ordered to report to his new cell, where staffers soon heard screams but failed to take action, the state lawsuit alleges. When Lapich rang an emergency bell, reporting that his cellmate fell out of his bed onto the floor, they found a pool of blood and boot marks on Hagen’s head.
He was pronounced dead the following day at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in nearby Boise.
Lapich is awaiting trial for murder.