$5.4M in legal fees awarded by judge to inmates' attorneys in jail-brutality case
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A federal judge has awarded more than $5 million in legal fees to lawyers representing five inmates at a Los Angeles County jail who alleged brutality by deputies, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The inmates themselves won a jury award of $950,000 in damages last February. The jury award included $210,000 in punitive damages.
The suit stemmed from an August 2008 incident in which inmates at Men’s Central Jail refused to leave their cells, and suffered broken bones and other injuries after deputies confronted them. Lead plaintiff Heriberto Rodriguez alleged that deputies kicked, beat and choked him until he was unconscious; woke him with a stun gun; shocked him with the device over multiple parts of his body, including his testicles; and hit him in the head with a flashlight. He suffered a skull fracture. The county claimed that deputies’ actions were justified because a riot had broken out.
U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall awarded the plaintiffs’ attorneys nearly $5.4 million for legal fees, after accepting their claim that they spent nearly 6,000 hours on the case, billing as much as $975 an hour. One of the lawyers, Ronald Kaye, told the judge he had spent more than 70 hours a week in trial preparation, declining to take another promising case in order to do so.
In the trial last February, inmates won on both state and federal civil-rights claims, and though limited by caps on lawyers’ fees in the federal matters, Judge Marshall was able to double the state portion because of the risk and difficulties faced by the lawyers.
“This should be a wake-up bell for the county,” said Kaye. “This was an outrageous violation of the civil rights of these inmates and resulted in outrageous injuries.”
The Times reports that in 2012 a blue-ribbon commission found a culture of violence among the jail staff, who were permitted to assault and humiliate inmates and cover up their wrongdoing. Some deputies were also accused of assaulting visitors to the jail.
In a separate jail brutality case in December, Los Angeles County agreed to a court-appointed panel to monitor use of force by deputies and agreed to pay $950,000 in legal fees to the ACLU of Southern California.
