The State - News from Nov. 4, 1985

Inspectors have found more than 100 health and safety deficiencies in the last year at the San Quentin Prison Hospital where, in the last five years, two inmates have died and a third had a leg amputated because a cast was put on too tightly, the San Francisco Examiner reported Sunday. Inmate Michael Myreholt, 30, serving a life sentence for murder, has filed a $1.1-million civil suit against the state and several doctors after his right leg was amputated in 1981. Dr. Jack Williams, chief medical officer at the prison’s Neumiller Hospital in Marin County, said doctors did not realize that the cast on Myreholt’s leg was too tight. In 1980, inmate John Wakefield, 49, serving a five-year sentence for robbery, lapsed into a diabetic coma and died. Doctors did not know he had the disease, Williams said. In 1984, inmate Thomas Rushie Scott, 63, serving a life sentence for murder, died of a bleeding ulcer. Doctors were not notified of the inmate’s hemorrhaging.