The Alabama Department of Corrections has settled a wrongful death lawsuit against corrections officers who beat a man to death at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019, though the department continues to deny that the officers used excessive force.
A settlement payment of $250,000 was issued Aug. 16 in the case of Sondra Ray v. Roderick Gadson, et al., according to data from the Alabama Department of Finance.
Before reaching the settlement, the state paid 11 different attorneys or firms a total of $393,000 to defend the corrections officers named in the lawsuit, the records show.
Ray filed the lawsuit in 2020 after the October 2019 death of her son, Steven Davis. The day before he was removed from life support, Davis, 35, was rushed to University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital with critical injuries after an incident involving multiple officers inside a "behavior modification unit" or "hot bay" at Donaldson prison. A medical examiner classified Davis' death as a homicide, caused by "blunt force injuries of head sustained during an assault."
Ray, reached by phone, had no comment on the lawsuit or settlement agreement, but said nothing will ever heal the grief she experienced in losing her son five years ago.
"It never leaves you," she said. "If they hadn't killed him, I wonder if he'd be here right now helping me. I wonder if he'd have kids. What they took from me will never go away."
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall declined to press criminal charges against the officers involved, and the department's internal investigation determined the officers' use of force against Davis was justified.
The criminal investigation began in the Bessemer district attorney's office, but in 2020, Bessemer DA Lynneice Washington recused her office when she learned one of the officers involved in Davis' death was related to an assistant prosecutor in Bessemer. At that point, the criminal investigation was transferred to the attorney general's office.
Hank Sherrod, an attorney representing Ray, said in a statement that "ADOC and the criminal justice system failed to hold anyone accountable."
"Sandy would trade every dollar to have her son back or to see the officers who murdered her son go to prison, but she is glad to close this chapter in her life," the statement said.
Four officers were named in the lawsuit. Two of them were still working for the corrections department as of this month, according to payment records available in the Open Alabama checkbook database maintained by the state department of finance.
The corections department confirmed that the two officers were still employed but did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit settlement.
From the beginning, department officials framed the incident that led to Davis' death as one in which officers felt threatened by Davis -- an account disputed by Ray and some witnesses. Ray described her son as a follower, not an instigator.
"Stevie was in a confined area," she said in 2019, shortly after his death. "He wouldn't create an altercation. He didn't want to die. He was coming home to take care of me."
A statement the corrections department released two days after Davis' death said Davis rushed out of his cell brandishing a prison-made weapon in each hand and refused to comply with officers' demands to drop his weapons.
"At that time, correctional officers applied physical measures to diffuse the threat in order to remove the weapons from the scene and secure the inmate," the statement concluded.
But the civil complaint filed by Ray stated that officers "brutally beat Davis, ultimately killing him," and therefore subjected him to excessive force, violating his constitutional rights. The complaint disputed the account by corrections officials, saying Davis dropped the weapons and submitted to officers, but they still beat him, striking him in the head with batons and stomping on his head.
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"The blows to Davis' head are considered deadly force and would have been excessive even if Davis was resisting the officers," the complaint argued.
The U.S. Department of Justice released a report in July 2020 concluding that officers within corrections department frequently use excessive force on men housed throughout Alabama prisons, giving rise to systemically unconstitutional conditions.
While not naming Davis, the report described his death. It stated that he had initially rushed toward another prisoner, not officers, and that an officer sprayed him with a chemical agent and struck him on the arm, causing him to drop a weapon.
"A second correctional officer responded to the scene and administered palm-heel strikes to the prisoner's head as well as knee-to-head strikes as he tried to disarm the prisoner," the report stated. "The prisoner eventually went to the ground face down and officers reported that the prisoner concealed a knife between his upper torso and the floor. Numerous prisoner-witnesses, however, reported that correctional officers continued to strike the prisoner after he dropped any weapons and posed no threat."
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Davis was in prison on a probation violation related to drug possession. In 2009, he pleaded guilty in a fatal robbery in which he drove a vehicle involved in the incident. He was killed several days after the corrections department transferred him to Donaldson Prison in Bessemer from Bibb Correctional Facility in Brent, a town in Bibb County.
After her son was killed, Ray spoke to lawmakers about her family's experience, telling them she had to have a closed casket at his funeral because of the severity of his head and facial injuries. She continued to speak publicly about the lack of transparency by the corrections department, generating national media coverage of the incident in the year following Davis' death.
Legal spending by the corrections department spiked in recent years as the embattled agency faces hundreds of lawsuits filed by prisoners and their families over excessive force, wrongful death, failure to protect from violence and medical neglect.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state in 2020, saying "the state failed or refused to correct the unconstitutional conditions in Alabama's prisons for men."
Two class action lawsuits against the corrections department are in their 10th year of litigation -- one over the lack of mental health care across the system and the other addressing violence inside St. Clair Correctional Facility.
Read more at AlabamaReflector.com.