Ex-Deputy Gets $40,000 More From Sheriff : Courts: Jurors seek to send message by adding punitive damages to verdict against Duffy for his malice in firing a former deputy from a police academy post.

Asserting that officials sworn to uphold the law must follow the law, a Superior Court jury Monday ordered Sheriff John Duffy to pay $40,000 to a former deputy whom it said the sheriff maliciously fired from a police academy teaching job.

The additional damages, designed solely to punish Duffy, came on top of the jury’s verdict last week that Duffy and the county must pay $200,000 to former Sheriff’s Sgt. John DeAngelis, who brought the suit. Of that $200,000, Duffy must help pay $175,000, the jury ruled.

Duffy promised an appeal, and lawyers in the case said the county could opt to reimburse Duffy for any amount that was eventually deemed his responsibility.

Jurors said the damages, especially the $40,000 award, were calculated to send a message to Duffy and to the department he has headed for more than 19 years.

“We expect the upholders of the law to abide by the law,” said Jim Cargill, 51, of Lemon Grove, a diesel technology instructor who served as foreman for the special hearing that yielded the $40,000 award.

“If they support the Constitution, they, of all people, should live by the Constitution,” Cargill said.

Duffy was not available for comment after the verdict but issued a statement calling the $40,000 verdict “inappropriate.” He said he intended to appeal.

The sheriff, who has announced he will retire next year at the end of his current term, also predicted that the verdict would have a “chilling effect” on him for the rest of his term. He did not elaborate.

Duffy, who came under criticism last year for his extensive out-of-town travels and for not reporting outside income earned as a consultant, had declined to comment Monday when leaving the courtroom. But he said from the stand, “They say you’re never a prophet in your own land. I’ve come to believe that after 20 years.”

The county lawyer who defended Duffy in the case, Cheryl A. Geyerman, declined comment.

In its original $200,000 verdict, returned Friday, the jury found that Duffy wrongfully removed DeAngelis from his teaching position at the Sheriff’s Academy. It found that the sheriff had vengefully made the move after DeAngelis testified at a civil service hearing on behalf of another deputy.

DeAngelis said at the June, 1987, hearing that Deputy Benny Cruz, who had been accused of using excessive force on jail inmates, had not been too tough. In court documents he filed in the case, DeAngelis said this testimony upset top Sheriff’s Department officials, who fired him from his teaching job the next month.

Duffy personally directed an internal affairs investigation into an allegation that DeAngelis taught recruits excessive force, a claim the sheriff’s investigator eventually rejected. Meanwhile, high-ranking department officials harassed him so severely that he resigned from the department in February, 1988, DeAngelis said.

The jury split the $200,000 award into two parts. It ordered the county to pay DeAngelis $25,000 in lost wages. Both Duffy and the county were responsible for $175,000 in damages for emotional distress, it said. But the jury did not specify what the split of responsibility would be. That was left for Judge Paul E. Overton, who presided over the case, said DeAngelis’ lawyer, Thomas R. Laube.

County supervisors could not be reached for comment Monday about the option of paying for Duffy’s share of the bill.

In another lawsuit Duffy lost a couple of years ago--to the ACLU, which successfully charged that he improperly used deputies to campaign in 1986 against Rose Bird, then the state’s chief justice--the county declined to pay $33,796 in attorney’s fees and court costs.

Three campaign supporters loaned Duffy $36,000 in 1988 to cover the costs, on the condition that he pay it back in a year. It is unclear whether Duffy has since paid the money back.

Last week’s $200,000 verdict, meanwhile, entitled DeAngelis to pursue additional damages and led to Monday’s hearing, at which Duffy took the stand. Requests for the added award, called punitive damages, are often linked by lawyers to the net worth of the person or corporation ordered to pay the money, Laube said last week.

In response to Laube’s questions, Duffy, as he has consistently, downplayed suspicions that he has extensive outside earnings.

He said he and his wife, Linda, a county probation officer, own a custom Scripps Ranch house worth about $800,000. He said they had about $20,000 in retirement accounts and bank accounts worth about $5,000.

The sheriff’s annual salary is about $93,000. Duffy said, as he did last fall, that he had made about $13,000 in outside consulting from 1983 to 1989. He did not discuss the $36,000 loan.

He also said he did not bring his financial records to court with him because no one had told him he should. Overton confirmed that he had not ordered Geyerman to tell Duffy to produce any documents, saying he had expected that the hearing would touch only on a general discussion of Duffy’s finances.

Laube had asked jurors to return an additional award of $50,000, or $10,000 each for the “handful of lies” he contended sheriff’s officials had offered at the trial.

Since this was a civil case, the jury did not have to reach a unanimous decision, only a 9-3 count, the judge said. It voted 10-2 to award additional damages and 9-3 to peg the award at $40,000, foreman Cargill said.

“I think (sheriff’s officials) had no room for any independent thinking, and I just think that’s wrong,” said juror Cathy Stuhler, who works for a biotechnology firm in Chula Vista.

Laube said he was delighted with the $40,000 award. He said he was particularly impressed with the jury’s decision to take on an authority figure, particularly one whose color pictures--two of them--are in display cases jurors pass each day on their way to the jury lounge.

The verdict “sends a message that our country won’t tolerate retaliation against people who speak the truth, even if the boss doesn’t like it,” Laube said.

DeAngelis said he would have been willing to settle the case--but not for the $1,000 the county once offered him. He said he was “very pleased” with the added award.

Because of the verdict, sheriff’s officials “won’t get away with the same kind of things they did to me,” DeAngelis predicted. “And if they do, they’ll be held accountable for it.”

He also said, however, that he is not sure he will ever see the cash the jury said he was due. “I guess I’ll wait for the appeals and everything before I count my chickens,” he said.