State and county to pay $4.1M to innocent couple listed for years on child-abuse registry
A California couple who spent years on a state list of claimed child abusers, based on a false accusation by a runaway teen, has reached a settlement of over $4 million.
State lawmakers agreed last year to pay $1.7 million to Craig and Wendy Humphries and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday OK’d an additional payout of $2.4 million to the couple, the Los Angeles Times (sub. req.) reports.
County officials spent an additional $935,000 on legal fees as they fought the couple’s civil suit.
Civil litigation over the 2001 listing by a sheriff’s deputy of claimed “substantiated” child abuse continued until 2012, when a Los Angeles judge ordered the county to notify the state that the claim had been disproven. Until then, each government entity pointed to the other as allegedly responsible for making the correction, the Times article explains.
Another judge had dismissed a misdemeanor criminal case four months after the Humphries were listed on California’s Child Abuse Central Index and declared them “factually innocent.”
“This could have all been avoided for the price of a postage stamp, if the county had simply asked the state to get them off the list,” attorney Esther Boynton, who represented the couple, told the newspaper.
The article doesn’t include any comment from the county or the state.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Couple on Child Abuse List Despite Exoneration Loses Supreme Court Case”
