An Oahu judge awarded $1.375 million to the family of a 28-year-old man who hanged himself at Halawa Correctional Facility while being held in solitary confinement under a suicide “safety watch.”

The verdict was handed down Tuesday by 1st Circuit Court Judge John Tonaki after a bench trial in which the state admitted to being negligent in the July 2017 suicide of Joseph O’Malley, with the only issue how much to award in damages.

“It’s a bittersweet moment,” the man’s father, Michael O’Malley, said during a downtown news conference Wednesday. “I still have a giant, permanent hole in my heart. I’d much rather have Joey back than me sitting here having to talk about it.”

O’Malley, a corporate tax attorney, said he hopes his son’s death leads to positive changes in Hawaii’s prison system to prevent others from losing their mentally ill loved ones unnecessarily.

“The judge’s verdict should be a strong message to the Department of Public Safety that we have to do better in this area,” said Thomas Otake, O’Malley’s attorney. “Providing appropriate mental health care for the severely mentally ill in our prisons is not an option, it’s a responsibility.”

DPS, which runs Hawaii’s corrections system, said it wouldn’t comment on the award until officials review the findings with the state Department of the Attorney General.

However, in a statement, the agency said it “has sound policy for the care and custody of inmates with mental illness. The Department routinely reviews and updates all policies including the inmate suicide prevention policy which is in accord with national standards.”

But Michael Livingston, another attorney who worked on the case, said the suicide prevention policy is not the problem; the problem is that the rules and regulations were largely ignored by staff at the Halawa prison.

The evidence of this was so overwhelming, he said, that the state agreed to the liability in both its supervision of the inmate and in providing adequate mental health care, which led to the suicide.

Joseph O’Malley was a special-needs foster child who was placed with Michael O’Malley and his former spouse within days following his 1989 birth. The O’Malleys adopted the boy within a year, their only son.

Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth, the boy later was found to suffer from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other learning disabilities. He was a special education student who graduated from Kailua High School.

According to court records, his mental health issues worsened as he got older and he was prescribed an assortment of medications to help deal with the voices in his head, hallucinations and other symptoms.

After moving away from home, O’Malley was arrested in 2009 for robbing a cab driver using a replica handgun. From that time forward he remained connected to the Hawaii criminal justice and correctional systems through extended stays at the Hawaii State Hospital, a probation violation and mental health-related jailhouse misconduct.

He would do time at both the Oahu Community Correctional Center and Halawa, where he attempted to cut himself and take his own life on numerous occasions, records show.

Otake said O’Malley deserved better treatment. For example, he was denied privileges and treated differently from other inmates while he was on suicide watch, contrary to the prison’s own policy.

“Most of the time when Joey was in suicide watch, he was locked in a cell by himself with zero belongings for over 23 hours a day,” Otake said. “He ate alone, he didn’t have rec time. It was somewhat inhumane in our eyes — and avoidable.”

A psychiatrist testified at the trial that although O’Malley’s condition was serious, it was “very treatable” and he would have survived his prison stay with proper mental health care.

Dr. Pablo Stewart also said O’Malley would have lived a productive and meaningful life in the outside world with strong family support and appropriate psychiatric care.

“He didn’t belong in Halawa,” Michael O’Malley said. “Our mental health expert made it clear based on their own regulations that he really belonged in a hospital that could care for him — not in segregated, solitary confinement without medication to go insane by himself and die the way he did.”

He added: “He was not a throwaway kid. He mattered.”