This piece in the Sacramento Bee, 5/16/10 reports that the federal court approved of a settlement in the McEvers suit over his suicide at the Sacramento jail while in federal custody. What's with Linda Harter's chicken reference?
He was arrested on those violations May 13, 2005, and entered the Sacramento County Main Jail. Five days later, after being ordered back to Ohio, he hanged himself with a sheet attached to his bunk. He was 24, a graduate of El Camino High School with no prior criminal history.
A judge last week approved the settlement of a civil rights lawsuit in which the federal government agreed to pay McEvers' mother, wife and two young sons $661,000. As part of the same suit, the judge in late April signed off on a settlement in which the county agreed to pay the four $250,000.
The county has also agreed to pay his father, Harry McEvers, $15,000 as a nuisance settlement, despite strong evidence that the elder McEvers physically and psychologically abused his son as he was growing up.
The total bill, excluding a small army of lawyers for the two government entities and their personnel: $926,000.
"The chickens have finally come home to roost," First Assistant Federal Defender Linda Harter, whose office represented McEvers, said of the civil settlement. "Sooner or later it was bound to happen. In the marshals office and at the jail, they have a knee-jerk reaction that anybody charged with a crime must be faking an illness."
Both federal and county governments had reasons to settle the suit targeting the suicide, which because of the unyielding efforts of the family's attorney, Stewart Katz, was subjected to intense scrutiny over a three-year period.