Lauren I. Freidenberg-McBride

Six Hours on the Concrete

Jacob Mitchell had Type I diabetes and schizophrenia. After an emergency-room visit for hypoglycemia, a jail deputy gave him long-acting insulin. The civil complaint alleged that he lay dead on his cell floor for more than six hours before anyone entered.

The Tremors

Jacob Mitchell was twenty-nine when Pend Oreille County confined him in its jail. He needed insulin to live. His schizophrenia and other mental-health conditions, the later civil complaint alleged, kept him from safely managing his food intake and diabetes without assistance. Doses, blood-sugar readings, meals, and signs of distress therefore depended on the people holding him.

The complaint described a dangerous division of responsibility. Unlicensed correctional officers managed Mitchell’s diabetes from day to day. Medical professionals saw him when an acute problem sent him outside the jail, but no individualized treatment plan governed the chronic condition that repeatedly produced those emergencies.

In the days before April 4, 2023, Mitchell cried, shook, and asked for help. The suit alleged that deputies dismissed his visible tremors as attention-seeking, insulted him, and told him to be quiet. An emergency room treated his hypoglycemia and returned his blood sugar to approximately normal. The complaint alleged that late that evening a deputy administered Lantus, an insulin designed to keep lowering glucose over many hours.

Freidenberg-McBride, Tim Ford, and Braden Pence later represented Mitchell’s estate and his father. Their pleading set the insulin dose against the recent hypoglycemia, the pleas for help, the absence of a treatment plan, and the jail’s control over every practical means of keeping Mitchell alive.

Six Hours

Mitchell died during the night. Deputies found him kneeling forward on the concrete in what witnesses described as a prayer position. The complaint alleged that no adequate cell check or other monitoring occurred for more than six hours. Full rigor mortis had developed before anyone opened the door.

His estate and father filed the federal action on April 4, 2025, exactly two years after his death. They brought an Eighth Amendment claim for inadequate medical care and related state-law claims against the county and individual jail personnel. After an answer and scheduling conference, the plaintiffs filed a September 25 notice that the parties had settled.

The $1.9 million resolution also prescribed safeguards. The jail agreed to use sensors in single-occupancy cells to detect abnormal conduct and vital signs. It would offer a wrist monitor when a person disclosed a chronic condition during intake or when staff learned of one later. Annual training would cover diabetes monitoring, blood-sugar testing, insulin injections, and signs or symptoms associated with the disease.

Those provisions reached three points of failure alleged in the suit: knowledge at intake, competent management of insulin, and detection of a collapse behind a closed door. By October 2025, the county sheriff told a local newspaper that officials were contacting vendors, considering wiring changes, and examining medical wristbands and meal procedures.

Jessie Booth on Suicide Watch

Jessie Booth entered the Clark County Jail on December 2, 2021, while withdrawing from fentanyl. Over the following days, deputies recorded screaming, incoherent speech, and increasingly erratic behavior. The federal suit later alleged that jail personnel moved him among cells as he deteriorated and that NaphCare, the private medical contractor, failed to provide meaningful medical or mental-health care.

On December 7, Booth was placed on suicide watch. A deputy saw him repeatedly climb onto a metal sink and jump down. The complaint alleged that no one stopped the conduct, summoned clinical help, or implemented a suicide-prevention plan. Booth eventually dove headfirst from the sink onto the concrete floor.

The impact injured his spinal cord and left him quadriplegic. He died from complications of the neck injury on January 20, 2022, at age twenty-nine. His survivors included a three-year-old son. Freidenberg-McBride and Jesse Wing represented Booth’s estate, his child, and his mother in claims under Section 1983 and state medical-malpractice law.

The cell had a watcher but, on the allegations, no effective intervention. That gap became the center of the settlement: when observation reveals immediate self-harm, what must the observing officer do before another jump?

Code Red

By April 30, 2025, the parties had placed a stipulated motion to approve the settlement on the federal court’s calendar. Because Booth’s son was a minor, the court reviewed the protected allocation before approving it. On June 4, Judge David G. Estudillo entered an amended order, dismissed the individual defendants and NaphCare with prejudice, directed entry of a $2.6 million judgment against Clark County, and ordered the action closed after judgment. NaphCare’s separate contribution remained confidential.

The court also approved new language in Clark County’s Conduct of Suicide Watch policy. An officer who sees a person on a sink, toilet, upper bunk, pony wall, or another elevated surface must direct the person to stop. If the person continues climbing or actively harming himself, the officer must act and call a Code Red for an inmate disturbance or fight.

Additional staff may then control the person physically and use restraints. The shift sergeant must consult mental-health personnel, if available, when deciding whether restraints or constant suicide watch should continue. The county agreed to train correctional officers on the revised rule in 2025, 2026, and 2027.

The revised policy required officers to give a direct order, summon additional staff, intervene when self-harm continued, and consult mental-health personnel about restraints or constant observation. The judgment and policy terms were enforceable parts of the settlement.

Release within Twenty-Four Hours

Humberto Jimenez-Perez was sixty-two when his detention reached federal court. A Cuban national who had lived in the United States for more than four decades, he had raised a family of United States citizens. A removal order remained on the books, but the government had been unable to deport him for more than twenty-five years.

Immigration authorities took him into custody in June 2025, days before a scheduled medical procedure and weeks before his anticipated release from California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation custody. He was transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. His health worsened while the government continued to hold him without a country prepared to receive him.

Freidenberg-McBride and Anna Deal represented Jimenez-Perez pro bono, with Andrew Drake and Itzel Barajas supporting the litigation. The habeas case opened in December 2025. By February 2026, he had spent more than eight months in immigration detention.

The Six-Month Line

The Supreme Court’s decision in Zadvydas v. Davis places a limit on detention after a final removal order. Six months is the presumptively reasonable period. Once a person gives good reason to believe removal is no longer significantly likely in the reasonably foreseeable future, the government must answer with evidence capable of sustaining continued custody.

Judge James L. Robart found no evidence that Cuba or any other country would accept Jimenez-Perez and no realistic prospect of removal in the near future. On February 17, 2026, the court granted the habeas petition, entered judgment, and ordered his release within twenty-four hours.

The government noticed an appeal on April 20. The Ninth Circuit issued its mandate on May 13.

Nine Seconds at the Port of Entry

On December 17, 2017, Jesus and Raquel Castellanos entered secondary inspection at the Calexico Port of Entry with their adult son, Marco. A dispute began when an officer believed Marco was using his phone to record a sensitive operation and demanded the device. As officers moved to restrain Marco, Jesus approached and told his son to calm down.

The accounts diverged from there. Jesus said he reached toward his son. An officer interpreted the movement as contact with another agent. Officer Michael Hedlund pushed Jesus backward, and a physical struggle followed. Surveillance video captured the area, but it did not provide an unobstructed view of every movement or record the commands the officers said they gave.

The first interaction between Hedlund and Jesus lasted approximately nine seconds. That brief interval generated disputes over warning, resistance, probable cause, and the amount of force used. Freidenberg-McBride, Eugene Iredale, and Julia Yoo represented the Castellanos plaintiffs in claims against the officer and the United States.

A Border Case Kept Alive

In February 2020, the Southern District of California denied the defense motion for summary judgment. The court treated Jesus Castellanos’s Fourth Amendment damages claims as ordinary federal law-enforcement misconduct rather than a new Bivens context barred solely because the encounter occurred at an international port of entry.

The video did not eliminate the factual conflicts. The court found triable disputes over whether Jesus received commands, resisted, touched an officer, faced force disproportionate to the circumstances, or was arrested without probable cause. Those unresolved facts also prevented qualified immunity on the excessive-force and false-arrest claims at summary judgment.

The United States invoked the Federal Tort Claims Act’s customs exception. The court held that the exception protected the detention of goods and merchandise, not the alleged wrongful detention and injury of a person, and allowed the tort claims to continue as well.

The court allowed the claims to proceed to trial without deciding liability.

Ten Years Returned

Freidenberg-McBride’s custodial-care work has also reached executive clemency. In a separate Washington matter, she obtained commutation of a Department of Corrections sentence ten years early after denial of adequate medical care became central to the request.

The commutation shortened the remaining term of custody by ten years; it did not award damages or change jail policy. The medical record, sentence history, present danger, and reasons for executive intervention must converge on the immediate consequence of release.

Return to Seattle

Freidenberg-McBride began civil-rights practice after her 2016 California admission. Before returning to Seattle, she helped secure more than $35 million for civil-rights clients in California. Her work there included wrongful death, excessive force, false arrest, and denial of medical care, along with litigation at the border and inside custodial institutions.

She earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of California, San Diego, and her law degree from the University of San Diego School of Law. During law school, she worked with the San Diego County Alternate Public Defender and the Small Claims Clinic.

After twelve years in Southern California, she returned to her hometown and joined MacDonald Hoague & Bayless. She is admitted in Washington and California and before the Ninth Circuit. Her board service with the National Police Accountability Project extends the same work into a national network of lawyers handling deaths, force, and denial of care.