Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: The family of a California teen who was pronounced dead after a surgical complication two years ago has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking to have her death certificate revoked, CBS San Francisco reports. 
  
 Attorney Christopher Dolan said Wednesday that he and the family of Jahi McMath have spent much of the past year asking state and county officials to revoke the death certificate and declare her legally alive, with no success. The lawsuit names the state and various county officials as defendants and alleges that they are violating McMath's rights by refusing to consider evidence that she is alive, if severely brain injured. 
  
 The family says it has evidence that McMath does not meet the criteria for brain death, including the fact that she sometimes moves on command and that her body remains in good condition and has even entered puberty. They argue this evidence shows she should be declared alive. 
  
 "Nobody is saying Jahi is going to get up tomorrow and walk, but we're saying she deserves the same care as anyone else in California with a brain injury," Dolan said. "We want all of her rights restored to her so that she can come back to California." The girl is currently being cared for at a facility in New Jersey. 
  
 The lawsuit argues that the laws regarding brain death are unconstitutional because they do not provide any means for a finding of death to be challenged or reversed, according to Dolan. 
  
 McMath was declared brain dead on Dec. 12, 2013 at the age of 13 after developing complications from surgery for sleep apnea at UCSF Benioff Oakland Children's Hospital. 
  
 Her family rejected the decision and fought to keep her on life support. After a legal battle, they won permission to move her out of the hospital for continued care. Before they could move her, however, hospital officials required the family to get a death certificate from the Alameda County coroner. 
  
 McMath's mother, Nialah Winkfield, said she hopes the lawsuit will allow her to bring her daughter back home to California and obtain health insurance for her there. She moved Jahi to New Jersey because state law there recognizes a religious exemption to brain death findings and continues to recognize McMath as a living person for the purposes of obtaining health insurance. 
  
 "I want her to have the same rights as any other disabled person," Winkfield said, speaking by Skype to reporters in California. 
  
 Winkfield said it has been hard to be so far away from family and friends. She has been forced to give up her job, sell her house and tap her mother's resources to keep going. She no longer lives with her other two children, she said. 
  
 "I'm ready to come home," Winkfield said. 
  
 Dolan said he is providing his legal services to the family for free. 
  
 In March, the family also filed a medical malpractice suit against the hospital in Alameda County Superior Court. That case has a case management conference scheduled for Jan. 8. 
  
 Attempts to reach hospital officials for comment were unsuccessful. ||||| Family Wants Brain-Dead Girl Declared Alive SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - The family of a teenager declared legally dead after complications from surgery for sleep apnea is taking its case to void her death certificate to Federal Court. 
  
 Jahi McMath, now 15 years old, underwent the surgery on Dec. 9, 2013 at Children's Hospital Oakland. The hospital is now a part of UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. 
  
 Her tonsils and adenoids were removed, and her mother Nailah Winkfield claims in a 57-page civil suit the procedure was presented to her as "routine," and doctors described it as successful afterward. 
  
 But McMath soon started bleeding from the mouth so profusely that it had to be caught in a bucket, and although doctors reassured Winkfield that the bleeding was "normal," McMath suffered cardiac arrest and severe brain swelling. Doctors at the hospital pronounced her brain dead on Dec. 12. 
  
 Winkfield says that hospital officials continually pressured her to sign documents authorizing them to take her daughter off life support, and after an intense legal battle a judge in Alameda County Superior Court ruled that McMath met the legal criteria for brain death. 
  
 Before the hospital could take McMath off life support, Winkfield arranged for Jahi's transfer to a medical facility in New Jersey, where state law contains a religious exemption to brain death. 
  
 McMath is still in New Jersey, where she receives "minimal in-home care support," is in "excellent health," with "no skin or organ breakdown" and "irrefutable brain function," Winkfield says in her complaint. 
  
 McMath's family filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court in March for conditional wrongful death, naming the children's hospital and surgeon Frederick Rosen as defendants. 
  
 The federal lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California, involves civil rights claims against the state of California, Alameda County, the Alameda County Department of Public Health, the California Department of Public Health and many of those entities' officials. 
  
 In the federal suit, Winkfield and McMath claim violations of their First, Fifth and 14th Amendment rights, including due process and the right to privacy. 
  
 "These government agencies and officials have failed to provide any process or avenue for Winkfield to prove that Jahi is not brain dead and have summarily, without any hearing, denied to even consider whether Jahi does not meet the criteria for brain death and is therefore alive," Winkfield says in the suit. 
  
 Winkfield says she "wishes to have her daughter's basic human right, to life, restored to her so that she can return to California, and specifically Oakland, the place where Winkfield and Jahi were born and raised, to be surrounded by the love and support of their family." 
  
 She adds, "As it is presently, should Jahi leave New Jersey, and its protections provided by New Jersey's religious exemption to brain death, she could be refused treatment, unplugged, even shot, without repercussion as she is legally dead in California. 
  
 "It is incumbent upon the U.S. District Court to exercise its constitutional and statutory powers and rectify this injustice." 
  
 Winkfield says her Christian religious beliefs "include a conviction requiring the provision of all treatment, care, and nutrition to a body that is living," arguing that Alameda County's actions have violated her right to exercise those beliefs. 
  
 Numerous signs, she says, indicate that her daughter is alive, including the onset of menstruation and multifaceted evidence of brain function - evidence she calls "uncontroverted and overwhelming." 
  
 "Jahi's remarkable strength and resiliency despite the serious brain injury she suffered, and her failure to exhibit the predicted deterioration, proves that 'in accordance with accepted medical standards,' Jahi has not in fact suffered 'irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem,'" Winkfield says in the suit. 
  
 According to the complaint, McMath's neurological status continues to improve, she understands words and she can move her fingers in response to verbal commands. 
  
 Christopher Dolan, McMath and Winkfield's attorney, said in a statement that "the fact that the state refuses to recognize the mountain of evidence that Jahi McMath does not meet brain death criteria is the most grave of injustices." 
  
 "In essence, they proclaim that once she is determined to be brain dead they will never revisit, or reconsider, the death sentence no matter what factual evidence is presented," he said. 
  
 "This is like refusing to reconsider a death sentence when evidence is presented demonstrating that the original conviction was erroneous, and the condemned was innocent." 
  
 The Alameda County Public Health Department did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on Thursday. 
  
  ||||| A Northern California mother's two-year quest to have her brain-dead daughter declared legally alive moved to federal court Wednesday after attempts to secure an order from a state judge ended in failure.Lawyers for the mother of 13-year-old Jahi McMath filed a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court asking that the girl be declared alive after state courts have refused to rescind the teen's death certificate. McMath suffered cardiac arrest in December 2013 after a routine operation to remove her tonsils to cure her sleep apnea. Doctors say she suffered irreversible brain damage from lack of oxygen and declared her brain dead.The Alameda County coroner in Oakland, California, signed Jahi McMath's death certificate a few weeks later, but McMath's family sought a state court ruling declaring the teen is still alive. A state court judge earlier this year refused the family's request and upheld the death certificate after a respected Stanford University neurologist and two other medical experts concluded the girl was dead.Jahi's family is now asking a federal judge to declare Jahi alive and invalidate the death certificate. If that happens, insurance companies will be required to pay for her medical treatment, says lawyer Chris Dolan, who represents Jahi's family.Dolan says insurance companies are paying for Jahi's nursing care and around-the-clock treatment with a ventilator in New Jersey, the only state in the country that requires medical treatment of patients like McMath who are declared dead but show minimal brain function.McMath's family, led by her mother Nailah Winkfield, want a federal court to invalidate the death certificate so they can care for the in their home in Oakland."I want her to have the same rights as any other disabled kid," Winkfield said.McMath's mother says her daughter show some signs of life, including the twitching of fingers and toes.Medical experts said those movements could be spasms and reflexes commonly seen in corpses. They say McMath shows hardly any brain activity and is clinically dead.But her mother isn't ready to give up. Winfield said she recently sold her Oakland home and is living off those rapidly dwindling proceeds."I won't give up on Jahi, because I'm her mother," Winkfield said. |||||
Student:
It's been two years since Jahi McMath's tonsil surgery went wrong, she suffered brain death, and was declared dead, and now her family wants that death certificate revoked for the now-15-year-old who remains on life support. Jahi's mom, Nailah Winkfield, is suing in federal court various entities that include the state of California to have her daughter declared legally alive, reports Courthouse News Service. She "wishes to have her daughter's basic human right, to life, restored to her so that she can return to California" from New Jersey. Jahi is currently under care in the latter state, which allows a religious exemption to rulings about brain death, notes CBS News. "I want her to have the same rights as any other disabled kid," says Winkfield, per the AP. Should Jahi leave New Jersey without such a declaration, per the suit, "she could be refused treatment, unplugged, even shot, without repercussion as she is legally dead in California." Getting the death certificate overturned would allow the family to move Jahi back to Oakland and have insurers cover her medical bills, the family attorney tells AP. Winkfield says in her lawsuit that Jahi shows signs of life, including what she calls "uncontroverted and overwhelming" evidence of brain function, and has begun to menstruate. A California state judge earlier this year upheld the death certificate; her family's lawsuit against the hospital that performed the tonsillectomy brutally detailed the surgery gone wrong.