Hugh A. Eastwood

Tracing Responsibility Beyond the Officer

Four women entered a Missouri drug court under the supervision of a sheriff’s lieutenant. He used the program’s authority to enter their homes, search their bodies, and coerce sexual contact. Hugh Eastwood followed responsibility beyond the officer to the public institution that had sent him out alone.

Earn It Back

The Adult Drug Court of Missouri’s 45th Judicial Circuit placed participants under close supervision while they pursued treatment. A law-enforcement officer called the tracker checked curfews, entered homes, searched refrigerators and trash, administered urine tests, reported violations, and could take a participant into custody for a sanction.

Scott Edwards, then a lieutenant in the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, held that position. He visited women at night, transported them alone, and conducted searches. The later appellate record established that he used those encounters to commit repeated sexual assaults. After one participant relapsed, Edwards told her she could avoid a sanction through sexual favors—she could “earn it back.”

The women believed he could report a violation, conceal one, or influence whether they went to jail. Some assaults occurred while participants were incarcerated as a drug-court sanction. Others occurred during home checks, transports, or searches. Edwards pleaded guilty to federal civil-rights offenses involving five women and received ten years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

Eastwood and co-counsel represented four of those women in a civil action. The question remaining after Edwards’s conviction was whether Lincoln County bore responsibility for placing him in that position without adequate supervision.

Drug-Court Supervision

The drug court was governed by a multi-agency memorandum and a procedures manual. Those documents assigned the sheriff a monitoring role and described home visits, testing, and custody decisions. The memorandum contemplated joint home visits. In practice, Edwards worked almost exclusively alone, including during night visits to young women.

The sheriff stayed out of team meetings with Edwards, left his performance unmonitored, and approved time sheets without verification. Department rules requiring officers to report their location and mileage when transporting women went unenforced on tracker trips. Jail staff saw Edwards take incarcerated participants outside for unauthorized breaks. Drug-court team members heard sexual comments and observed his attention to younger women.

In an earlier appeal, the court granted the sheriff qualified immunity from individual liability because that claim required proof of his subjective knowledge. The municipal claim applied an objective deliberate-indifference standard. After a three-day trial, the jury found that the Lincoln County Sheriff, as a county policymaker, was deliberately indifferent to the obvious risk created by the failure to supervise Edwards.

The jury awarded $750,000 to one plaintiff and $500,000 to each of the other three, a total of $2.25 million. In 2017, the Eighth Circuit held that the evidence supported the verdict under the instructions given and affirmed the denial of a new trial.

Fifty-Six Thousand Red-Light Refunds

Eastwood and Bevis Schock challenged a St. Louis red-light-camera ordinance that treated a vehicle’s registered owner as the driver unless the owner proved otherwise. On August 18, 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court held the ordinance unconstitutional because it shifted the prosecution’s burden of proving who committed the violation.

St. Louis dismissed pending cases and issued full $100 refunds to more than 56,000 people who had paid tickets while the ruling was pending.

Project 87 Reforms

After a St. Louis SWAT raid damaged a family home, Eastwood led mediation of the remaining municipal claims concerning a housing inspection conducted under Project 87.

In 2018, the City agreed to pay $155,000 plus costs and to amend the program. Police would need a particularized reason to suspect an immediate fire, health, or safety threat before requesting an inspection, and officials could not obtain consent by threatening immediate condemnation or removal.