by Matt Clarke
On February 17, 2021, a Kentucky federal court dismissed a lawsuit brought by a woman who was abandoned by jailers while a pretrial detainee and forced to give birth alone in a cell. The lawsuit had been settled for $200,000.
According to court documents, on May 15, ...
by David M. Reutter
The Wisconsin Department of Corrections paid $105,000 to settle a prisoner’s excessive use of force lawsuit. The December 2, 2020, settlements resolves the suit brought by prisoner Kuan Barnett.
Barnett’s civil rights action stemmed from events that occurred at Columbia Correctional Institution. While locked in his ...
by David M. Reutter
An Illinois federal district court awarded $300,000 to a prisoner who alleged a female food supervisor coerced him into sexual activity.
The court’s September 29, 2020, order was issued following a damages bench trial. The lawsuit was filed by Illinois prisoner Donald Quickle. He was represented ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 14, 2020, a federal judge approved a $3 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by the family of a Pennsylvania jail prisoner who died after being held in a restraint chair with his face covered by a “spit mask” because guards mistook a seizure for ...
by Mark Wilson
"Michael Barton died a brutal death because he was ignored and then written off as faking symptoms and refusing medication,” said attorney Bryan Dawson, upon securing a $3 million settlement in August 2020 — the largest in Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) history — for the late ...
by Mark Wilson
On June 30, 2020, an Oregon county agreed to pay Albert Molina $625,000 to settle his claim that a jail guard fractured his skull in an unprovoked 2018 attack. Two days later, county prosecutors — who had initially declined to bring charges — obtained indictments against Washington ...
by David M. Reutter
On May 7, 2020, Kentucky’s Larue County Detention Center agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging former guard Jerome Perry sexually abused nine prisoners.
The women’s lawsuit alleged that between February 1, 2018, and August 20, 2018, Perry “harassed, assaulted, abused, and sexually ...
by Douglas Ankney
An October 15, 2020 report from the Santa Fe New Mexican revealed that in March 2020, the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower complaint that exposed deficiencies of private health-care provider Corizon Correctional Health Care (Corizon) and the NMCD’s failure to ...
by David M. Reutter
The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) on August 6, 2020 agreed to pay $4.65 million to prisoner Cheryl Weimar, who was beaten “to within an inch of her life” two years earlier by guards at the Lowell Correctional Institution (LCI). The investigation into the beating continued ...
by Derek Gilna
Salt Lake County, Utah settled in March of 2020 a wrongful-death lawsuit stemming from the in-custody death in 2016 of Lisa Marie Ostler, who died when jail officials ignored her symptoms of serious Crohn’s disease.
The settlement concluded a federal civil rights lawsuit, which had alleged that, ...