County Settles Suit in Inmate’s Jail Beating

The Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday to settle a lawsuit filed by a convicted child molester who alleged sheriff’s deputies conspired to have him beaten by jail inmates.

The supervisors, without discussion, approved a payment of $150,000 to John Eric Chambers, 26, who was convicted in 1996 of molesting a 6-year-old girl in Saugus. “With so much pain and suffering out there, you hate to give money to a child molester,” Supervisor Don Knabe said after the meeting. “But the facts were on his side.”

Chambers was held in Men’s Central Jail after his March 1996 arrest, and remained there for several months as his case progressed through the court system. He was kept in the jail’s private psychiatric unit under a suicide watch. After his sentencing in August 1996, he was returned to the jail to await a transfer to state prison for his three-year term.

A judge ordered deputies to keep Chambers under guard in the jail’s psychiatric unit until the transfer. But shortly after he was brought back to the jail, deputies shifted him to a holding area containing inmates from the general population.

He alleged in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court that deputies warned him he was going to be beaten. On Sept. 25, 1996, he was attacked by a dozen inmates and left with a skull fracture, loss of hearing in his right ear and other injuries.

Lawyers for the county predicted if the case went to trial, a jury would find the Sheriff’s Department liable and award Chambers $1.1 million.

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Sheriff’s investigators are conducting an internal probe into allegations that deputies engineered more than a dozen inmate attacks on sex offenders by leaking the nature of their crimes to other inmates.

ACLU officials said more than a dozen sex offenders had complained of such beatings since the start of the year.

The nature of their crime “does not change the responsibility of the county to keep all inmates safe,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. “They have responsibility even to the worst of people.”

Virginia Keeny, Chambers’ attorney, said her client had provided the name of at least one deputy he believed to be involved in his beating to county officials. But she said no one from the Sheriff’s Department had yet interviewed Chambers.

Chambers was paroled from state prison in January after serving 15 months, and has been ordered to pay $200 restitution. Rather than pay the girl’s family directly, he will contribute the money to a statewide fund for crime victims, state officials said.

“This settlement sends a message to the county that this type of abuse of inmates will not be tolerated,” Keeny said. “Mr. Chambers is looking forward to putting this behind him.”