Jailhouse Blues for Taxpayers, Happy Faces for Lawyers
By John Millrany - August 17, 2001A case of jailhouse blues for taxpayers—but a potential boon to lawyers who know their way around jail—has resulted in the largest civil rights settlement in county history, a $27 million payout to settle five class-action suits involving illegal detention of inmates.
A protracted glitch by the County Sheriff’s Department has kept prisoners in jail after courts ordered them released. Blaming clerical errors, the department admitted that for years it kept thousands of inmates past the date a judge ordered their release.
According to the LA Times, the settlement ordered by the Board of Supervisors "should staunch the cost to taxpayers of lawsuits filed by people who have been imprisoned too long, mistakenly arrested on someone else’s warrant or illegally strip-searched.
"But observers question whether all members of the class of people jailed beyond their release dates—up to 400,000—will be satisfied with their share of the settlement. As many as half of those people were illegally strip-searched while in custody, and many may choose to pursue separate lawsuits."
The Times added that, "Despite repeated alarms about the problem since the mid-1990s, a new computer system to connect the jail to the courts is not scheduled to be working until 2003."
AP reported that some of the inmates were wrongly imprisoned because of erroneous warrants.
"It’s not pleasing for me to stand up in front of the county of Los Angeles and talk about a $27 million settlement in those terms," Sheriff Lee Baca said at a news conference Tuesday night. "My greatest wish is that the Sheriff’s Department would have done the right thing when these claims were coming in and fix it," he added ruefully.
One attorney projected that after deducting $5.5 million in lawyers’ fees and $750,000 for the 62 named plaintiffs from the $27 million, the amount available to the remaining claimants works out to about $53 apiece. | 
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