Coronavirus nursing home bodies and shackled inmates spark lawsuits ? and perhaps justice

This week, for example, we learned that 68 people linked to a single New Jersey nursing home have died from the coronavirus — after an anonymous tip led to the grim discovery of 17 bodies in a tiny four-person morgue.The good news is that we don't necessarily need to wait for Congress to act, or for Trump administration officials to admit their own deadly mistakes, for some measure of truth and accountability to begin to emerge. All alleging a form of negligence or "deliberate indifference" on the part of jailers or the medical staff inside facilities who didn't take the virus seriously enough and/or who then refused to release from confinement those whose medical conditions or ages made them particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.For the families of the incarcerated, most of these lawsuits will fail because the law is set up for them to fail, because legislators and judges over time have erected enormously high evidentiary barriers designed to preclude successful wrongful death claims against corrections officials. This lawsuit likely will fail for a number of reasons, but wouldn't it be something if the state court required network executives to be deposed about how all those early broadcasts disseminated information about the pandemic that was at odds with the guidelines of public health officials?Some civil litigation isn't aimed at deadly negligence but rather the freedom to travel within the nation's borders.