Pittsburgh City Paper: “When Dejour Palmer was hospitalized during his recent incarceration at the Allegheny County Jail, his lawyer and family were left in the dark.

After a June 11 hearing at which a judge dropped the charges against Palmer, his family was expecting his release within 72 hours. Instead, they didn’t hear from him for a week.

‘I started getting calls from his family members saying, “Do you know what’s going on with him? He hasn’t called. He usually calls every night, and we haven’t heard from him,”‘ Palmer’s lawyer Aaron Sontz tells Pittsburgh City Paper. Palmer’s lawyer and family saw on his court docket that he was no longer in the custody of the jail.

‘I started looking into it, and nobody would give me any information. The jail wouldn’t tell me where he was,’ Sontz says.

Sontz learned that Palmer had been sent to an outside hospital and was in the custody of the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department.

‘It just started getting more and more absurd as we tried to just get some information about him, and the sheriffs [were] just adamant in not giving us any information, and it just sort of snowballed from there,’ Sontz says….

Tanisha Long, a community organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center, tells CP that Palmer’s situation is an unfortunately common one.

‘Anytime someone who is incarcerated [at ACJ] goes to the hospital, our first notification is from other incarcerated people. We don’t find out from the jail. The attorney is not notified,’ Long says.

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