The Sacramento Bee reports today on a settlement in which El Dorado County paid a woman represented by attorney Stewart Katz $127,000, resulting from her unlawful arrest and tasering in jail after she refused to leave the Sheriff's Office where she went to try to talk to the Sheriff to discuss her daughter's drug problem:
Kathleen Copelin Pastula wanted to see the sheriff of her county.
Perhaps naively, she went to the El Dorado County sheriff's office without an appointment to discuss with him her daughter's substance abuse problem and two experiences stemming from her daughter's condition that Pastula had with deputies within the previous 72 hours.
A 56-year-old housewife and mother of four, she was looking for answers, trying to cope with the worst kind of trouble a parent can face.
Pastula never got the meeting she wanted. Instead she became embroiled in an ordeal that would involve a night in jail, two courts, a criminal charge dismissed and a check written to her to settle a civil lawsuit.
* * *
Pastula was charged with resisting arrest. On the trial's second day, after hearing all the witnesses, El Dorado Superior Court Judge James R. Wagoner threw the case out and excused the jury.
"I just do not see how a reasonable jury, having heard this information, this testimony, and evaluating the conduct, could find that Ms. Pastula had violated" the law, Wagoner told the attorneys.