The costs of Alabama prison litigation are rising. Private attorneys are reaping the rewards.

Yahoo

22-05-2025

A review of data obtained from the state Department of Finance on yearly transactions from the General Liability Trust Fund between 2020 and 2024 found legal expenses associated with defending Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) officers accused of excessive force and failure to protect prisoners from harm or death amounted to $12.9 million, almost triple the settlements paid to inmates or their families. (Alex Cochran for Alabama Reflector)
Note: This story contains a discussion of sexual assault.
Since 2020, Alabama has paid settlements in at least 124 lawsuits filed against correctional officers in the state's overcrowded and violent prison system.
But the legal bills for defending the officers have far outpaced what incarcerated people and their families have received in settlements.
A review of data obtained from the state Department of Finance on yearly transactions from the General Liability Trust Fund between 2020 and 2024 found legal expenses associated with defending Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) officers accused of excessive force and failure to protect prisoners from harm or death amounted to $12.9 million.
May 19: The Alabama Department of Corrections has settled over 90 lawsuits alleging corrections officers used excessive force, costing the state millions of dollars.
May 20: Even as the prison population has declined, use of force incidents in Alabama's prisons and some corrections officers named in lawsuits alleging excessive force have not only held onto jobs, but been promoted.
May 21: The anatomy of one inmate's allegations against a corrections officer, and the aftermath.
May 22: Who's paying for these settlements? You are. Who's getting the most money from this litigation? .
Settlement payments totaled $4.4 million in the same time period. ADOC's total use of the trust fund since 2020 was over $17 million, by far the most of any state agency.
'The General Liability Trust Fund certainly expends more resources for ADOC than any other agency,' Daryl Masters, an assistant attorney general with the Department of Finance, wrote in an email, adding that Alabama's Department of Human Resources, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency and the Alabama Department of Public Health follow ADOC in terms of costs.
Between these individual complaints, plus defending ADOC in several class-action cases and the U.S. Department of Justice's lawsuit over prison conditions, ADOC has spent over $57 million on legal expenses since 2020. State records on Alabama Checkbook report that the majority of the money comes out of the General Fund.
The Attorney General's office represents ADOC, and directs the defense of state employees who are sued on the job. In 2023, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall stripped ADOC's legal staff of its ability to represent ADOC employees in legal matters.
The Attorney General's Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
When ADOC employees are sued, they are now represented either by attorneys from the AG's Office, or increasingly, by private lawyers hired by the AG's Office through contracts that do not require a formal competitive bidding process.
The AG's Office must inform the Joint Legislative Contract Review Committee, which meets once a month, about the contracts. The committee can place a 45-day hold on a contract but cannot permanently block or prevent a legal services contract from going through.
Some members of the committee have expressed concern over ADOC's increasing use of outside attorneys and the mounting costs of litigation.
'It's fair to ask, how long is this supposed to go on?' said Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa. 'Are we ever going to get out from underneath this stuff? What kind of statement does it make about our prison system that all these cases are filed and we never hear about results?'
Attorneys who represent plaintiffs suing officers with the Department of Corrections cannot directly bill the liability trust fund for their legal services. Some represent clients at no charge as pro bono work, or others establish an agreement with the client to collect payment through a percentage of any settlement.
Several attorneys who have represented prisoners said the process has become increasingly adversarial as more outside lawyers represent correctional staff and drag litigation out.
'Using outside law firms billing by the hour can make the GLTF (liability trust fund) more of a pot of gold for law firms than a fund to compensate victims,' said Hank Sherrod, who has represented incarcerated people and their families in civil litigation against officers. 'These outside attorneys have every incentive to bill the shit out of the fund and sometimes do, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and depleting the fund.'
The vast majority of lawsuits in this time frame involved claims of excessive force, but cases connected to sexual assaults and deaths from violence have proven much costlier to the department, both in legal expenses and settlement amounts.
Some of the wrongful death and failure to protect complaints contain details of horrific assaults.
2019 sexual assault at Bullock Correctional Facility. According to the complaint, the plaintiff was placed in a dorm with a man who had threatened him. The plaintiff said that he informed the warden that he was in danger, and the warden laughed at him. Another officer allegedly told the plaintiff, 'maybe they will kill your retarded cracker ass.' The plaintiff was later dragged to his bunk and raped by the man who had threatened him. He reported the assault and was taken to an outside facility for treatment where the rape was confirmed. ADOC then brought him back to Bullock and placed him in the same dorm with the same assailant, who raped the victim a second time. According to a lawsuit, the victim 'suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression, rips and tears in rectum, scars from stabbing, scarred pupil from assault, hearing loss from being kicked in his right ear, chronic pain, flashbacks, embarrassment, blood clots, passing blood clots, nightmares, has been required to undergo surgery and mental health treatment. He continues to fear for his life.' A settlement payment for $10,621.70 in this case was issued in March 2024.
2017 killing of Joseph Wood at St. Clair Correctional Facility two months after he arrived at the prison. The complaint was originally filed by Wood's mother, who wrote that other prisoners were extorting her son inside the prison, and he was afraid officers were involved. 'No one has ever told me who was responsible for killing my son,' she wrote. 'I learned the most about his death after ADOC released the body to me for burial. I saw that he had been beaten, stabbed and strangled. The Department of Corrections failed to protect my son… I would like them to be held accountable for my loss and how they've treated my family.' After five years of litigation, a settlement payment was issued in 2024 for $125,000. Attorneys representing ADOC officers and staff named in the lawsuit collected over $400,000 for their legal work defending the officers.
The largest settlement amount from the last five years came from a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the mother of 28-year-old Travis Sessions, who died from bronchopneumonia, or inflammation of the lungs, while incarcerated at Red Eagle Community Work Center in 2018.
The complaint stated Sessions was sick for days with worsening symptoms, experiencing shortness of breath and coughing up blood, but at least three officers ignored his requests for help for days, until he was dying.
'He basically drowned in his own blood when Red Eagle personnel refused to get (him) the medical help he needed,' the complaint stated.
Attorneys representing the three officers in the lawsuit authorized a $600,000 settlement payment to a lawyer representing the man's family, effectively ending the lawsuit. The family received half of the settlement, and the attorney received the other half.
The Sessions litigation lasted over 22 months, with lawyers from the Attorney General's Office representing the named officers. But other complaints that attributed deaths or assaults to prison understaffing led to more protracted litigation and higher legal expenses.
He basically drowned in his own blood when Red Eagle personnel refused to get (him) the medical help he needed.
– Lawsuit over death of Travis Sessions
One such case was filed by the mother of 29-year-old Terry Pettiway, who was stabbed to death by another prisoner at St. Clair Correctional Facility in 2018. Attorneys from two firms, Sidley Austin LLP in New York, and White Arnold & Dowd P.C. in Birmingham, agreed to represent the mother at no charge, and filed the complaint in 2020.
According to the complaint, Pettiway was repeatedly stabbed in the back and neck after trying to break up a fight, and 'left to bleed out while the housing block and the common areas around it were effectively left completely unattended by prison staff.' Fellow prisoners attempted CPR but were unsuccessful, according to the complaint.
The complaint accused 13 prison officers, supervisors and ADOC commissioners of enabling Pettiway's killing 'by their reckless or intentional failures to take actions to reasonably protect from violence.' The complaint also alleged that on the day of Pettiway's death, a single prison guard was responsible for supervising a general population yard, in use by prisoners from eight separate cell blocks. The guard was unaware of the fight that Pettiway tried to break up, and when Pettiway was stabbed 14 to 17 times, 'the guards were nowhere to be found.'
The Attorney General's Office hired private attorneys to defend the ADOC employees in the lawsuit over Pettiway's death. After more than two years of litigation, ADOC settled the case in 2023 for $250,000.
But according to Alabama Department of Finance data, the state spent $502,930 on legal bills from two law firms hired to represent the ADOC defendants, Maynard Nexsen PC in Huntsville and Capell & Howard PC in Montgomery.
Masters said the state's Division of Risk Management encourages parties to settle a case as early as they can, but that's not always possible. Masters acknowledged that ADOC's use of the trust fund has gone up in recent years, but did not provide details about any actions Risk Management has taken to prevent future complaints in ADOC, saying those discussions would be considered privileged.
'The agencies themselves are the ones who are responsible for dealing with any particular type of claim,' he continued. 'It would be up to them to make some change or do what they could, within the confines of their own responsibilities, to make corrections or changes to cause those numbers to go down.'
When asked what, if any, corrective actions have been taken inside the prisons to prevent future complaints, ADOC spokesperson Kelly Betts provided few details.
'It varies depending on the incident,' Betts wrote. 'ADOC follows the corrective action policies listed in the Administrative Regulations.'
Alabama's General Liability Trust Fund is a public resource, funded with taxpayer dollars, although not under the same level of scrutiny as the state's General Fund budget. The Alabama Attorney General's Office and the Division of Risk Management make the decisions about how to use the fund, on behalf of the public.
Beginning in 2022, ADOC has been required by law to publish active litigation in its quarterly statistical reports. The reports indicate the number of complaints filed against ADOC continues to increase — 199 new lawsuits were filed in 2024, the highest annual number since the agency began publishing the information in 2022. Previous quarterly statistical reports showed 149 new complaints filed in 2023, and 128 in 2022.
But the information published in these quarterly reports — name of lawsuit, date filed, case number — tells a limited story. The reports do not include the allegations, the nature of the lawsuits, the names of officers or the extent of the alleged injuries.
Another deficient aspect is ADOC's own accounting of legal expenses in these reports. The prison transparency law requires ADOC to include the amount paid to defend litigation against the department, but a review of all available ADOC quarterly statistical reports found no such figures on legal spending.
Under costs, the reports include the same entry for every lawsuit— '$0 – all monies paid to defend are paid by the Department of Finance, Division of Risk Management, via the coverage provided to State employees through the General Liability Trust Fund.'
What the reports don't say is that ADOC's premiums to participate in the trust fund have tripled in the last decade, from $1.1 million in 2015 to $4.4 million in 2024, according to data provided by the Department of Finance. ADOC's rate increase has occurred while the agency's overall staff has shrunk by 20%.
All state agencies pay an annual fee to the trust fund, and this participation rate is determined by the Department of Finance, which bases it on the number of covered employees, and also an evaluation of each agency's use of the fund and number of claims year to year, Masters said. ADOC's rate increase has occurred despite the decrease in staffing in Alabama prisons.
The decisions on how to use money from the liability trust fund include whether to settle lawsuits against ADOC officers, for how much, and also the choice to defend officers accused of excessive force, sometimes through years of litigation.
Richard Rice, an attorney based in Birmingham who has represented incarcerated people in excessive force lawsuits, questioned the ethics of such decisions when the allegations in the 124 complaints the state has settled are so widespread and damning.
'Are you complicit in perpetuating this type of behavior when it's such an ongoing pattern, and you're defending them at all costs?' he asked. 'Our common values tell us this type of behavior is reprehensible. How do we not have those same common values for prisoners?'
This reporting was made possible by support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
When state employees are sued as individuals, Alabama's General Liability Trust Fund is used to pay for their legal defense and any monetary settlement for the plaintiff. This use of the fund was the subject of our reporting, and records helped us identify 124 lawsuits against Alabama Department of Corrections employees that resulted in settlements between 2020 and 2024. Read more about our strategy.
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