Plaintiff who suffers from bipolar disorder was detained to ensure she would testify against attacker and was incorrectly entered into the jail’s computer system as a defendant, lawsuit alleges

It is the kind of call every parent dreads: their child phoning to say she has been arrested and is in a Texas jail. Jenny was not behind bars because she was accused of a crime, however – but because she was a victim.

Jenny, a mentally ill rape survivor, is suing Harris County officials who kept her imprisoned for a month over the Christmas holidays to ensure she would testify against her attacker.

Jenny, who is in her mid-20s and lives several hours from Houston, was in the city last December to give evidence against a man who was ultimately convicted and given two life sentences.

She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder about five years ago and often has panic attacks and “severe ups and downs”, which made her reluctant to testify, said her mother. Jenny and her mother asked not to be identified for fear of being singled out in their small town.

While testifying, Jenny suffered what the lawsuit describes as a “mental breakdown”. That prompted a pause in proceedings and she went outside to smoke a cigarette in a bid to calm her nerves, her mother said. But Jenny walked into traffic and an ambulance was called to take her to a nearby hospital so her mental health could be stabilised.

As a result, the trial was delayed until January. Jenny spent 10 days in a hospital, according to the lawsuit. When she was discharged an officer arrived, handcuffed her and took her to the county jail, it adds. The state had issued a “writ of attachment” seeking to keep her detained – a tactic sometimes used to control witnesses considered flight risks.

“It’s just disgusting. They didn’t call me, they didn’t call her father, they didn’t call [her fiance],” her mother said.

She found out about her daughter’s detention when she received a phone call from a strange number and a message informed her an inmate was calling from the Harris County jail. “She was crying and she was hysterical,” her mother said.

She claimed that repeated attempts to obtain accurate information about her daughter’s situation and secure her release went nowhere. Cancer treatment stopped her from visiting Jenny in jail, the lawsuit says, forcing them to communicate through calls from the facility charged at a rate of $9.95 each.

The complaint alleges that Jenny was incorrectly entered into the jail’s computer system as a defendant in a sexual assault case, instead of a victim, which contributed to alleged unsympathetic treatment of her in custody and caused distress and confusion because staff believed her insistence that she was innocent to be the product of a delusion.

It states that instead of placing her in the facility’s mental health unit she was put among the general population, where she was not consistently given her medications and was intimidated and taunted by other inmates and attacked by one who “repeatedly slammed her head into the concrete floor”.

It adds that she “spent the Christmas and New Year holidays without a toothbrush, hairbrush or towel. She was required to shower in front of the other inmates and when she wanted drinkable water, she was forced to drink from a spigot attached to a dirty metal toilet. These conditions further eroded [her] fragile mental state.”

On 8 January, the suit adds, she “suffered an acute psychiatric episode and began loudly pleading with God to come to her rescue”. Guards arrived, a physical confrontation ensued and Jenny was allegedly punched, slammed to the ground and handcuffed. She struck a guard and an assault charge against her was filed.

On 14 January, four weeks after she was picked up at the hospital, the assault accusation was dropped and Jenny was finally released, having completed her testimony against her rapist in ill-fitting used clothes provided by prosecutors, the suit states.

The lawsuit, which alleges unconstitutional seizure and arrest; failure to provide treatment and care; and unreasonable force and malicious prosecution.

Devon Anderson, the Harris County district attorney, issued a response via a YouTube video after Jenny’s story was revealed by KPRC local news.

In it she said she supports the authorities’ actions. “This report is disturbing but there is more to the story that you were not told,” she said.

“This situation compelled key personnel in the Harris County criminal justice system to answer an extraordinarily difficult question: how were we to ensure that a homeless, mentally ill victim of an aggravated sexual assault would return to testify at the trial of her rapist when that victim was going through a life-threatening mental health crisis and had expressed her intention not to testify? If nothing was done to prevent the victim from leaving Harris County in the middle of trial, a serial rapist would have gone free and her life would have been at risk while homeless on the street.”

Jenny’s mother and Sean Buckley, Jenny’s lawyer, said the assertion that she was homeless is untrue and that members of the district attorney’s office went to her apartment and picked her up to take her to Houston when she first gave evidence at the trial.

“We agree that this rapist needed to be prosecuted and convicted and we appreciate that the DA’s office had decided to do that. However, we are appalled that they would do it in such a way that further victimised this young woman,” Buckley said.

“The idea that you would protect someone by putting them in a dangerous and filthy jail is just frankly disingenuous. There were a multitude of community resources available including services offered by the DA’s office that could have helped them provide for this rape victim and stabilise her and help her remain stabilised and cared-for until it was time for her to testify again.”

Ron Honberg, national director for policy and legal affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the case appeared highly unusual and alarming. “You don’t treat somebody who’s been through extreme trauma by subjecting them to further trauma and yet it sounds like perhaps that’s what was done here,” he said.

“At a time when there’s a national conversation taking place that we incarcerate too many people with mental illness and we need alternatives to incarceration it seems particularly unfortunate, and I will say in fairness Houston has worked pretty hard to create alternatives to incarceration for people with mental illness. They have a nationally recognised program for the police to de-escalate crisis situations and divert people from arrest into treatment.”

Jenny’s mother said that her daughter is “not doing well at this point in time, not at all”. Buckley said: “She I think has been traumatised by these events and it has decreased her ability to trust the people who want to help her and I think it has really interfered with her progress.”