Former fertility doctor Cecil Jacobson has filed a $200 million lawsuit alleging his life has been shortened and his health jeopardized by poor medical treatment in prison.
Jacobson, who is behind bars for tricking some patients into believing they were pregnant and other patients by inseminating them with his own sperm, names various prison officers, medical personnel, the United States and 100 "John Does" in his lawsuit.Filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Utah, the complaint said Jacobson has been consistently deprived of needed medical care, resulting in serious damage to his health.
"Mr. Jacobson has been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment with shortening of his life not unlike an arbitrary death sentence," the complaint said.
A native Utahn, Jacobson returned to Provo and closed his northern Virginia genetics and fertility practice in 1988 after surrendering his license for negligence.
He was charged in 1991 with 52 counts of fraud connected with a scheme to falsely convince some women they were pregnant. Prosecutors said the women were later told that they had suffered miscarriages where fetuses were "resorbed" into their bodies. Also, he was accused of lying to patients about using his own sperm to inseminate them.
According to witnesses at his trial, Jacobson had promised them semen from tall, thin donors. Genetics tests showed Jacobson, who is neither tall nor thin, fathered at least 15 of his patients' children while operating the clinic from 1976 to 1988.
A jury convicted him in 1992, and he was sentenced to five years in prison. He is incarcerated in the Federal Medical Center at Fort Worth, Texas, but has also been an inmate in federal facilities in Florence, Colo., and Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
In his lawsuit, Jacobson said he has developed complications that "read like a list of diabetic horrors" because of a failure to treat his diabetes. He said he has developed retinopathy, sores on his feet that could lead to amputation, significant loss of strength and numbness.
Also, the suit said Jacobson has been "reduced to chewing his food with his front teeth as a rabbit would" because of the lack of adequate dental care.
Jacobson said in the suit that he developed a Health Promotion and Disease Prevention program at the federal prison at Nellis that helped many inmates, including him, lose weight through diet control and exer-cise.
However, the warden arbitrarily barred inmates from further use of the equipment, saying they were reserved for the use of Air Force and prison personnel, the suit said.
"Prior to entering federal prison incarceration, Mr. Jacobson was a world renown researcher, scientist and doctor in the fields of genetics and fertility," the suit said. Now, he has suffered progressive loss of memory and mental acuity, it said.
"Mr. Jacobson entered the federal prison system in vibrant good health. He will now exit the system with his body wrecked and ravaged by untreated diabetes," the suit said.