Feb. 19—A Casco woman is suing the Maine Department of Corrections, alleging her legal rights were violated while she was pregnant.
Katherine Rameau says that while she was incarcerated at the Maine Correctional Center in 2019, officers stayed in her hospital room while she was giving birth — despite a nurse’s request that they leave — which Rameau argues was against state law for pregnant prisoners.
In a civil complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland, Rameau is seeking not only monetary damages, but an order requiring Maine’s prison system to train officers and inform pregnant inmates of their rights.
Maine lawmakers voted in 2015 to prohibit the shackling of pregnant inmates. The law took effect that July.
The same law states “corrections officers may not be present in the room during labor or childbirth unless specifically requested by medical personnel.”
“Our Legislature is well-meaning, and they make laws,” Rameau’s attorney Jeremy Dean said in an interview Tuesday. “And sometimes, nobody carries them into effect. If they don’t know about it, they don’t follow it.”
A spokesperson for the department did not respond to an email Tuesday seeking reaction to Rameau’s allegations. Dean said he hasn’t yet served the state defendants a copy of the publicly-filed complaint.
Rameau is suing all of the officers who were in her hospital room when she was in labor six years ago, saying that they “ignored her requests” to leave the room “and instead made jokes and laughed at her.”
Rameau names three officers, but her attorney said they are still trying to identify several others who were also in the room.
She is also suing Corrections Department Commissioner Randall Liberty, and Scott Landry, who was warden at the time, for failing to implement policies consistent with state law.
In her complaint, Rameau says that a hospital employee asked the officers to leave the room and they said they weren’t allowed to. If that’s true, Rameau argues, the officers’ policy contradicted state law.
Dean also represented a Lewiston woman who was incarcerated at the Cumberland County Jail in 2019, who alleged male officers stayed in a hospital room while she gave birth, despite her preference that they leave. That woman recently dropped her claims and settled with the county for $350,000.
“Obviously, imprisoning people is a terrible necessity. We have to have law and order,” said Dean. “But at the same time, to the degree possible, prisoners should retain the basic human rights that give everyone dignity.”
Rameau’s complaint does not say why she was being held at Maine Correctional Center in February 2019.
She was 38 weeks pregnant when, during a scheduled appointment at Maine Medical Center, hospital staff induced her labor.
She was in labor for more than 12 hours — and for that entire time, she alleges, there was always an officer sitting feet away from her while she was either unclothed or wearing only a sports bra, the complaint states.
At one point, Rameau alleges, the officers suggested shackling her to the bed (which also would have contradicted state law since 2015). Rameau said medical personnel asked them not to.
“Defendants’ presence in Plaintiff’s hospital room while she was exposed during labor and delivery constituted a very long and very intimate search in violation of Plaintiff’s constitutional right to privacy,” the complaint states. “Defendants had no legitimate penological interest in remaining in Plaintiff’s hospital room.”
Rameau’s baby was taken home by the child’s father, and she returned to the correctional center where she was subject to two strip searches, the complaint states, even though she “had been in officers’ sight the entire time that she had been laboring and delivering her baby in (the) hospital.”
Rameau also said she had to wait more than four hours for products to help manage her postpartum bleeding.
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