Sarah Grady
Jail and Prison Civil Rights, Sexual Assault, Medical Care, and Wrongful Death
There should be a price to pay when you dehumanize people.
Twenty-Seven Employees
The Polk County Jail in northwestern Wisconsin held up to 160 prisoners and employed about twenty-seven correctional officers, and under the county's policy a prisoner who wanted to report a guard reported to the staff — often to a colleague of the guard she was reporting. There was no confidential channel. Darryl Christensen had worked in the jail for nineteen years. Between 2011 and 2014 he singled out two women who were held there intermittently, J.K.J. and M.J.J., beginning with comments about their bodies and escalating to sexual assaults in hidden areas of the jail whose access he controlled; J.K.J. testified that for two months in the summer of 2012 he demanded sexual contact every time he was on duty, and M.J.J. estimated that he had sexual contact with her twenty-five to seventy-five times. He told both women that disclosure would cost him his job and his family; they later described shame, fear of retaliation and doubt that anyone would believe them. In 2012 complaints about another officer, Allen Jorgenson, had reached the jail's captain; Jorgenson received a written reprimand, and when the complaining prisoner later wrote to recant the denials she had given, the county did not revisit the discipline. The abuse came to light when an investigator from another county telephoned Polk County with an allegation; the county opened an internal investigation, Christensen resigned when confronted, and a state criminal investigation led to the two women. He pleaded guilty and is serving a thirty-year sentence. The women sued him and the county under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and in February 2017, after a five-day trial before Judge William M. Conley in Madison, an eight-member jury found both liable, awarding each woman $2 million in compensatory damages against the county and the officer and $3.75 million in punitive damages against Christensen — $11.5 million in all. The jury had heard the jail-operations expert Jeffrey Eiser describe what the county had not done: a zero-tolerance policy, a coordinator for the federal rape-elimination standards, staff training, careful job assignments, education of prisoners about their rights, and a confidential way to report, such as a locked drop box.
December 5, 2019
On June 26, 2019 a divided panel of the Seventh Circuit set aside the judgment against the county, reasoning that a county could not be liable for a rogue guard who had violated its policy, its training and the law; Judge Michael Scudder dissented. Sarah Grady — a University of Iowa graduate with honors and a cum laude graduate of Northwestern University School of Law who had clerked for Judge Matthew F. Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois and then built and led Loevy & Loevy's Prisoners' Rights Project in Chicago — joined the women's counsel for the rehearing. The full court vacated the panel opinion on September 16, 2019, and on December 5, 2019 Grady argued the case to eleven judges. Judge Michael Brennan, the panel's author, pressed her on causation and said he found no testimony linking Jorgenson's conduct to Christensen's assaults; Judge Diane Sykes asked whether the plaintiffs had shown more than negligence; Chief Judge Diane Wood answered that the question was deliberate indifference to a substantial risk, and Judge Scudder asked whether the assaults were predictable once nothing was done after Jorgenson. The inference that they were, Grady told the court, was “a highly reasonable inference,” and the jury had drawn it. On May 15, 2020 the court affirmed the verdicts against both defendants, seven judges to four, in an opinion by Judge Scudder: Polk County “is not automatically on the hook for Christensen's unconstitutional acts just because it employed him,” but the jury was entitled to conclude that the county had notice of the risk of sexual misconduct, deliberately failed to respond to it and left in place the policy and training deficiencies that caused the abuse — “a choice that was the moving force behind the harm inflicted on J.K.J. and M.J.J.” Polk County petitioned for certiorari on September 29, 2020; the Supreme Court denied the petition on January 11, 2021. Grady co-founded Kaplan & Grady in Chicago, where she is a partner, co-teaches the Civil Rights Litigation Clinic at Northwestern's MacArthur Justice Center and sits on the boards of the Illinois Prison Project and the Uptown People's Law Center.
Logan Correctional Center, February 2017
Haley Heilman Metcalf was twenty-three and serving a short sentence for a nonviolent offense at Logan Correctional Center in Illinois when the prison assigned to her cell Jennifer Fleming, who had nearly five hundred disciplinary infractions and more than 250 tickets and a history of violence inside prison and out, had just been released from segregation for assaulting another prisoner, and had been classified as low aggression and never screened as a predator. At the start of 2017 the warden, Maggie Burke, had closed a maximum-security unit, which released Fleming into the general population. For weeks Fleming harassed and threatened Metcalf, who reported the danger repeatedly to prison staff; no one separated them. In February 2017 Fleming raped her. Metcalf needed surgery, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was transferred to another prison later that month. Her suit, Metcalf v. Burke, No. 18-cv-3260 in the Central District of Illinois, pleaded failure to protect and failure to train under the Eighth Amendment and willful and wanton conduct against the warden, the assistant wardens Beatrice Calhoun and Angel Wilson and other staff. Grady and Howard Kaplan tried it before Judge Sue E. Myerscough with David Schmutzer and Terah Tollner, over two weeks, against the Illinois Attorney General's Office. On Friday, February 2, 2024, a few days before the seventh anniversary of the assault, the jury returned $2 million in compensatory damages and $2.35 million in punitive damages — $4.35 million — against the officials who had known she was in danger, those who had failed to classify Fleming by her risk of predation and the former warden who had released the most dangerous prisoners into the general population without added safeguards. The verdict, Grady said, was “a really good outcome to help finally get accountability for the defendants.” The case closed in May 2025.
Seventy-Five Seconds
Nicholas Farah, thirty-six, of Appleton, Wisconsin, a father of two, flew into Las Vegas in March 2019 at the end of a family vacation in California, called for cabs at the airport and refused them when they came, and was arrested for trespassing at a La Quinta motel on South Valley View Boulevard after the staff said he had walked in and refused to leave. At the Clark County Detention Center the officers put him in a restraint chair. The jail's stationary camera recorded what followed: four officers pressed his head down toward his knees, his arms pulled behind him, for about seventy-five seconds while they exchanged one pair of handcuffs for another; he looked toward the camera, shouted a few times and went quiet; when they sat him upright he was motionless, and the officers went on fastening the chair for several seconds and turned it around before a medical staff member saw that he had stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead at a hospital less than ninety minutes later, on March 31, 2019. The Clark County coroner ruled the death a homicide: asphyxia during restraint procedures. In April 2020 Grady filed the family's federal suit for excessive force, wrongful death and negligence against the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, five corrections officers and a police officer. On January 24, 2022 the department's Committee on Fiscal Affairs approved a payment of $1.89 million, and with $490,000 in insurance proceeds the settlement came to $2.38 million. Grady said there should be a price to pay for dehumanizing a person, and asked that Farah be remembered for what he was: “He was a father, a son, a brother.”
