Rod Watson: Elected but not accountable? Jail death suit won’t finger real culprit

As his estate seeks a measure of justice for Richard A. Metcalf Jr., the inmate a state agency concluded died at the hands of poorly trained Erie County sheriff’s deputies in 2012, legal sleight of hand may mean that the criminal justice system holds no one responsible for that shoddy training.

Plaintiffs seeking civil justice in a jail death like Metcalf’s can’t go after the Sheriff’s Office. That’s because, as Niagara County officials summed up in 2015 in another case, using the term for long-accepted legal doctrine, “It is hornbook law that a sheriff’s office is not a cognizable legal entity separate from either the county government or the sheriff and, as a result, cannot be sued.” They pointed to “abundant case law … echoing this uncontroverted principle.”

That leaves just Erie County and five deputies as defendants in the civil suit filed by Metcalf’s estate.

Yet attorneys for Erie County also argued that the plaintiffs could not go after the county for failing to train and oversee the deputies because that is the job of the Sheriff’s Office, not county government. An appeals court in 2019 agreed, upholding a lower court ruling that the estate could no longer allege that the deputies were poorly trained.

In other words, like the carnival huckster who moves around the nutshells so quickly that the poor dupe has no chance of guessing which one hides the prize, the legal machinery has left Metcalf’s estate – and the public – with no real chance of finding where a good chunk of the accountability for his death actually lies.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be any legal reckoning, or that taxpayers won’t pay for the incompetence of the…