Five jail inmates who alleged that they were brutally beaten and shocked by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies have been awarded more than $5 million in legal fees, it was reported Wednesday.
The amount, approved by a federal judge last week, is unusually large for such cases and may encourage more attorneys to represent indigent plaintiffs who claim abuse by their jailers, the Los Angeles Times reported. It comes on top of $950,000 in damages that a federal jury awarded to the inmates after a trial last February.
The five inmates say they suffered broken bones in beatings by sheriff’s deputies when they refused to leave their cells at Men’s Central Jail on Aug. 25, 2008. The county argued that deputies took the steps they felt were necessary after a riot broke out, according to The Times.
In a Dec. 26 order, U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall accepted the winning attorneys’ assessment that they spent nearly 6,000 hours on the case at rates of up to $975 an hour, the newspaper reported. The attorneys said they had been willing to settle the case, including legal fees, for about $900,000, but the county refused.
Of the $950,000 jury award, $210,000 was for punitive damages and $9,500 will go to the inmates’ attorneys, in addition to the nearly $5.4 million in attorneys fees granted by the judge’s order.
“This should be a wake-up bell for the county,” Ronald Kaye, one of the attorneys, told The Times. “This was an outrageous violation of the civil rights of these inmates and resulted in outrageous injuries.”
Attorneys for the defendants — including the county, the LA Sheriff’s Department and nearly 30 sheriff’s officials — did not respond to The Times’ requests for comment. A note on the website of the law firm Lawrence Beach Allen & Choi, which litigated the case, said an appeal is planned.
—City News Service