Nevada agrees to pay former inmate $250K over delayed cancer care claim

Nevada agrees to pay former inmate $250K over delayed cancer care claim State officials have settled a claim brought by a former prisoner who alleged he did not receive timely cancer screenings while incarcerated. The Nevada Board of Examiners approved the $250,000 settlement in a unanimous vote at its July 14 meeting. The board consists of Governor Joe Lombardo, Attorney General Aaron Ford and Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar. Members did not discuss the settlement before the vote. Alfred Lajes, now 75, was held in custody from October 2014 through July 2022, according to the settlement statement he signed. In the tort claim he filed, Lajes said he noticed blood in his stool in May 2021 while he was housed at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City. He demanded $900,000 in damages. A memo from the Attorney General’s office noted that Lajes was later cleared to see a gastroenterologist but did not actually obtain an appointment for ten months. In March 2022, a gastroenterologist recommended that Lajes undergo both a colonoscopy and an upper endoscopy—a procedure that uses a camera on a flexible tube to inspect the upper digestive tract. Neither procedure was performed while he remained imprisoned, a fact the settlement statement and the Attorney General’s memo attribute to “unknown reasons.” After his release, Lajes received a colonoscopy at the Oncology Institute. Physicians identified a 25‑centimeter mass in his colon, and he was subsequently diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, the Attorney General’s memo reports. The office said medical records substantiate the allegations Lajes raised in his tort claim. Requests for comment from the Nevada Department of Corrections and from Lajes’s legal representative went unanswered. Attempts to contact Lajes directly also failed. The Attorney General’s memo adds that, had the claim proceeded to trial, Lajes’s counsel would have argued that the roughly two‑year delay in obtaining a colonoscopy and cancer diagnosis amounted to deliberate indifference—a legal standard used to determine whether a person consciously ignored a substantial risk of harm. Financially, $249,500 of the settlement will be drawn from the state’s tort claim fund, which is financed by assessments levied on state agencies. The remaining $500 will be paid by the Nevada Department of Corrections. As part of the agreement, Lajes has released the state and the Department of Corrections from any further claims related to the allegations in his tort claim.