PublicSource: “Aaron Tipton still has nightmares about his time at the Allegheny County Jail, which he attributes in part to a sergeant there who has been named in seven civil rights lawsuits since 2020.

When Tipton was in the jail in 2022 and 2023, he accused several corrections officers of abuse, then became the subject of unwanted attention from Sgt. Hunter Sarver, he alleged in a lawsuit filed last year.

Tipton, a 32-year-old man from Penn Hills, said in a complaint in federal court that Sarver in 2023 began ‘performing strip searches of [Tipton], without justification, and subjecting [Tipton] to solitary confinement, without justification.’

When Tipton filed grievances against Sarver, according to the complaint, things got worse. Tipton said Sarver began retaliating against him for filing the grievances by “performing daily anal searches” of Tipton….

Dolly Prabhu, a staff attorney with the Abolitionist Law Center, said an incarcerated person’s ability to bring a viable civil case against jail staff is limited by a requirement called ‘exhaustion.’ They must exhaust all legal remedies before they can file a viable legal case.

‘So if there is an internal system available to them, like a grievance process within the jail or prison, they have to go through that process first before they are able to bring a civil case. A lot of cases get dismissed because someone didn’t meet their exhaustion requirements,’ Prabhu said.”

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