While detained in Division 6 of the Cook County Jail, Plaintiff Willie Clay began experiencing a toothache. Clay claimed that he waited nearly a month before being evaluated by a dentist and that, as a result of the delay, he experienced unnecessary pain. For that reason, he brought the present civil rights action on behalf of himself and similarly situated Division 6 inmates against Defendants Thomas Dart, in his official capacity as the Sheriff of Cook County (“Sheriff”), and Cook County.
Clay also contended that Division 6’s dental clinic maintained grossly deficient scheduling and staffing policies that denied constitutionally adequate medical care to inmates.
The Court has certified a Plaintiff class consisting of similarly situated individuals assigned to Division 6 between February 19, 2018, and March 31, 2020, who submitted a written complaint of a toothache causing significant pain but failed to receive a timely evaluation by a dentist.
Defendants sought to exclude the opinions proffered by Clay’s expert, Dr. Anita Lockhart, and Clay, in turn, sought to strike Defendants’ expert, Dr. John Dovgan.
Dental Expert Witnesses
Anita Lockhart is a dentist who has worked as a clinical specialty consultant and dental officer with the Federal Bureau of Prisons since June 2013. She has authored a chapter regarding correctional dentistry in Correctional Health Care: Practice, Administration, and Law, an authoritative textbook,
with leading public health dentists
John W. Dovgan is a practicing dentist. He has been a board approved consultant for over 29 years, adjudicating more than 1,300 dental board cases in Arizona.
Discussion by the Court
Anita Lockhart
According to Defendants, Lockhart relied on cherry-picked data to conclude that the Division 6 dental clinic lacked adequate staffing and appropriate scheduling procedures to ensure that detainees with urgent toothaches were timely evaluated by a dentist.
Specifically, Defendants fault Lockhart’s opinions for being based in substantial part on the records of a sample of 45 detainees who submitted urgent health service request forms (HSRFs) during the class period that were selected and provided to her by class counsel.
The Court concluded that Lockhart’s use of a nonrandom sample is not a basis for excluding her opinions but instead is an issue to be explored on cross-examination.
Next, Defendants argued that Lockhart failed to conduct any meaningful analysis connecting her review of the exemplars’ medical records to her conclusion that there were systemic deficiencies in the Division 6 dental clinic’s staffing and scheduling practices that caused unreasonable delays in dental care for urgent HSRFs.
The Court, however, disagreed that Lockhart did not connect the dots between her review of the exemplars and her overall conclusion. Lockhart’s discussion of the exemplars is preceded by her extensive analysis of the Division 6 dental clinic’s response to the urgent HSRFs submitted by three of the related-case Plaintiffs.
Finally, Defendants argued that Lockhart’s opinions should be excluded because she is admittedly unable to identify the exact reason why any specific Plaintiff or exemplar was scheduled for a dentist’s appointment on a particular date. However, her opinions are not rendered inadmissible because she cannot assign a specific cause of delay for each detainee that she examined. It is enough that Lockhart offered well-founded opinions about the existence of systemic delays in scheduling urgent HSRFs at the Division 6 dental clinic.
John Dovgan
In this case, the central issues relate to whether the Division 6 dental clinic was adequately staffed, whether it maintained adequate scheduling procedures, and whether detainees with urgent complaints of pain from a toothache were timely scheduled for an appointment with a dentist.
Instead of directly confronting Clay’s core contentions about staffing, scheduling, and the timeliness of dental evaluations, Dovgan’s approach focuses on the ultimate issue of whether Division 6 detainees overall received objectively reasonable care.
To evaluate the quality of dental care that detainees received, Dovgan reviewed the treatment records from the class period for Clay and the related-case Plaintiffs along with a random sample of 84 detainees. To put together the sample, Dovgan selected the first complete name on every 25th page of the Division 6 dental clinic’s schedule for the class period. However, that process resulted in a detainee being selected for the sample regardless of whether he had submitted an HSRF indicating a pain level of 6 or greater. Thus, Dovgan’s sample sweeps in not just detainees with urgent HSRFs but also detainees whose HSRFs indicated conditions causing them no pain or requested routine procedures like a cleaning.
Another significant problem with Dovgan’s testimony is that, in instances where a detainee has complained of urgent pain, Dovgan offered his own opinion on whether that detainee was, in fact, suffering pain at the level indicated, and then he incorporated that credibility determination into his evaluation of the reasonableness of care the detainee received.
In short, the Court found that Dovgan’s opinions must be excluded in their entirety because they do not fit the relevant facts of this case, make improper assertions regarding the credibility of detainees’ subjective complaints of pain, and are not founded on scientifically reliable premises.
Held
The Court granted Clay’s motion to exclude the testimony of Dr. John Dovgan but denied Defendants’ motion to bar the expert testimony of Dr. Anita Lockhart.
Key Takeaway
This case concerns whether detainees with urgent complaints of pain from a toothache received a reasonably timely response from a dentist. Detainees who never submitted an urgent HSRF have no relevance to the reasonableness of care provided in response to urgent HSRFs. Dovgan’s analysis of a sample that includes those detainees provides an answer to a different question than the one asked and, as such, does not assist the trier of fact.
Case Details:
| Case Caption: | Clay V. Dart Et Al |
| Docket Number: | 1:19cv2412, 1:19cv02995, 1:19cv04348, 1:19cv06066, 1:19cv06702 |
| Court Name: | United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division |
| Order Date: | March 26, 2026 |
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