In a four-month period between September, 2000 and January, 2001, the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) was hit with separate jury verdicts for $22.4 and $15 million and settled two additional cases for $8.8 million. All four lawsuits stem from the DOC's negligent supervision of parolees in its care. The ...
Loaded on
May 15, 2001
published in Verdict1
May, 2001, page 14
On January 9, 2001, it was announced that New York City would pay $50 million to settle a class action lawsuit involving the suspicionless strip searches of some 58,000 people arrested on minor charges. For ten months in 1996 and 1997 jail guards in Manhattan and Queens strip-searched all arrestees ...
Loaded on
April 15, 2001
published in Verdict1
April, 2001, page 3
Two weeks short of 29 years after the Attica massacre, a federal judge divided an $8 million settlement to compensate more than 500 Attica prisoners and surviving relatives for the abuse suffered when prison guards and state troopers retook the prison after a 5 day siege.
At more than 200 ...
Plaintiffs Roger Smith, Donald Miniken, and Karl Twilleager, prisoners at the McNeil Island Correction Center (MICC) near Steilacoom, Washington, settled their consolidated Public Disclosure Act claims against defendants Washington Department of Corrections, MICC, and MICC Public Disclosure Officer, Rosemarie Routson on August 7, 2000.
The controversy arose from the prisoners' ...
Loaded on
April 15, 2001
published in Verdict1
April, 2001, page 28
Walter Friedl, a New York state prisoner, filed a ยง1983 action complaining that New York City and State officials had improperly revoked his work release program and reincarcerated him because he applied for welfare benefits. The City of New York settled for $20,000 while the district court granted the state's ...
Loaded on
March 15, 2001
published in Verdict1
March, 2001, page 30
$1.18 Million In Santa Clara Co. Sexual Assault/Harassment Suit
Female prisoners were awarded a total of $1,180,000 in damages and attorney's fees in the settlement of a suit filed against the Santa Clara County, California, Board of Supervisors and Department of Corrections over a pattern of sexual assaults, intimidation, abuse, ...
In September 1999, New York prison officials settled a lawsuit by prisoner Teno Gee for $115,000 in damages. Gee was the chairman of the Inmate Liaison Committee at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock. In that capacity Gee had caused a number of policy changes in the prison property ...
On September 27, 1999, District of Columbia federal judge Stanley Sporkin entered judgment on a settlement for $7,500, plus $47.81 in interest, in a lawsuit involving the shipping of a D.C. prisoner's legal property from a Washington state prison to a D.C. prison. Edward Ashford is a D.C. prisoner who ...
Loaded on
Jan. 15, 2001
published in Verdict1
January, 2001, page 8
In an unpublished ruling, the Tenth Circuit has denied qualified immunity to prison officials who failed to protect a prisoner from being raped by another prisoner.
Marvin Gray, a "large and powerful individual with a violent past," was a prisoner at Colorado's Limon Correctional Facility (LCF) in 1993. He had ...
Washington state parole officer Barbara A. Nelson was fired in 1998 after the state was hit for more than $6.4 million to pay off lawsuits alleging negligence for her failure to property supervise parolees. Three men whose cases Nelson handled killed three people, including a high school cheerleader, a 23 ...