Inmates Free to Opt Out of Deal

A landmark agreement by Los Angeles County to pay $27 million to settle five class-action lawsuits involving illegal detention of jail inmates will not necessarily end the county’s financial exposure on the issue.

County attorneys say the agreement--the largest civil rights settlement in county history--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 for more money.

After deducting $5.5 million in lawyer’s fees--not an unusually high amount, according to experts--and $750,000 for the 62 named plaintiffs from the $27 million, the amount left for the remaining claimants dwindles fast.

“That works out to $53 per person,” said attorney Stephen Yagman, who has a separate class-action lawsuit on the matter pending against the county. “I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but that doesn’t sound like any of the class members is going to get a lot of money.”

The individual payouts will almost certainly exceed $53. It is unlikely that every class member will respond to the settlement, meaning those who do may see payments in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The agreement caps individual awards for unnamed class members at $5,000, basing payouts on how the plaintiffs were treated in jail.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys who negotiated the settlement say they assume some people who were detained too long in county jails and illegally strip-searched during that time may choose to opt out of the settlement and pursue their own litigation. In the past, the county has settled such suits for up to $100,000 in especially severe cases.

“If I were an individual plaintiff saying I was subjected to a full body-cavity search . . . you’re maybe better off taking your case to trial,” said Donald Cook, one of the attorneys who litigated the class-action suits.

Cook cautioned, however, that that strategy would apply only to articulate individuals who would be sympathetic to a jury--a characteristic not necessarily shared by the entire class in the settlement, some of whom spent time in jail after being convicted of crimes. For those people, whatever sum they might receive as part of the settlement will be a windfall, he said.

“They would have never gotten recompense, never would have seen compensation for their over-detention” without the class-action settlement, Cook said.

Deputy county counsel Louis Aguilar acknowledged that there will be mistakes made that will lead to future litigation and that some will reject the settlement and pursue their own claims. “There will be opt-outs,” he said. “We will litigate those as we litigate any other case.”

In a similar class-action case in New York, a far smaller class of about 50,000 plaintiffs won settlements of up to $22,500 each. In that case, the plaintiffs had been illegally strip-searched, not held in jail too long.

In Los Angeles County, deputies routinely offered a few hundred dollars to inmates released tardily if they signed a form agreeing never to sue. The average was $450, according to county data.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys say they pursued the litigation largely to change the Sheriff’s Department policy of routinely delaying the release of inmates ordered freed by a judge. That has been accomplished, they say, because Sheriff Lee Baca, who took office in 1999, has changed procedures and brought about a marked drop in over-detentions.

“We are really, really pleased with the way Baca has responded,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Timothy Midgley, who, like his colleagues, blamed Baca’s predecessor, Sherman Block, for the over-detentions.

Although the Sheriff’s Department says its changes have cut the number of over-detentions, it admits that people occasionally are still held past their release date. Assistant Sheriff Dennis Dahlman said that 1% to 2% of all inmate releases are still behind schedule. With about 100 inmates released from the sprawling jail complex daily, that involves potentially hundreds of over-detained inmates annually.

The numbers used to be far higher. County attorneys estimate that as many as 40% of all inmates were released late between 1996 and this year. The problem can be traced to the fact that jailers rely on paper records from the courts to tell them when prisoners should be released. Lost or illegible paperwork led to numerous errors. And the sheriff’s system was so slow in processing prisoners that it often held people a day or more beyond their release date.

The problem has lingered for years, despite repeated warnings to the Sheriff’s Department and county supervisors. The proposed solution, a new computer system linking the jails to the court, won’t come online until 2003.

In the meantime, the Sheriff’s Department says it is processing releases faster. In particular, it is freeing inmates at the courthouse when they are ordered released by a judge. Previously, it would bring those inmates back to jail, where they would sometimes be held for days before being released.