Erie County intends to pay $150,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a diabetic defendant who nearly died when Holding Center personnel failed to give him his insulin over two days in 2005.

Craig Beatty was 36 and employed as a state corrections officer when arrested in a dispute with an Elma merchant in April of that year. He repeatedly told jail personnel and the deputy who arrested him that he would need his medicine. But he slipped into a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis after a series of failures and miscues by jail personnel.

When finally rushed to Erie County Medical Center, Beatty was dehydrated, unresponsive and hypothermic, with a body temperature at 94 degrees, according to court records.

“He could have died or could have suffered other consequences,” Dr. Muhammad Mir, a medical intern in ECMC’s intensive care unit, said of the patient when Mir sat for a deposition in 2007.

The Beatty episode might have revealed serious lapses in the jail’s medical care, but those lapses had been revealed just months earlier, by the state Commission of Correction in a report to the county.

The commission, which polices local jails in New York, warned Erie County that it was failing to provide a jail medical unit staffed around-the-clock.

County officials, in the throes of the mid-decade budget meltdown, reasoned they were providing round-the-clock care by ushering any inmate with serious late-night medical needs to ECMC. However, Beatty went without insulin through two critical overnight shifts.

During the first night, he said in court papers that he drank from a toilet because the attached sink did not work. The next afternoon he was given a medicine containing insulin, but he received none that night. He was found on the floor of his cell the following afternoon.

U. S. District Judge William M. Skretny refused to dismiss Beatty’s lawsuit earlier this year. He signed an order that concluded the Holding Center “lacked a policy for ensuring adequate care for inmates with diabetes who were brought into the facility when the medical department was closed.”

County lawyers argued that Beatty’s condition was probably worsened by the five medicines he had taken the day of his arrest. The county’s lawyers also denied that county officials were deliberately indifferent to inmate needs.

But with Skretny refusing to dismiss the lawsuit, County Attorney Cheryl A. Green set out to mediate a settlement with Beatty’s lawyers, Nan Haynes and John Ned Lipsitz. Those discussions led to the $150,000 figure, according to a source who asked to remain unidentified because the agreement was to remain confidential.

Green also turned to mediation in the pressing lawsuit filed against the county’s jails by the U. S. Justice Department. Erie County and the Justice Department then arrived at a multifaceted plan to better prevent inmate suicides. The parties now intend to mediate other aspects of the lawsuit that alleges Erie County fails to protect inmate rights by, among other things, providing inadequate medical care.