Imagine being a woman locked in a state prison who is repeatedly
raped by a male staff member.
Recently, a federal jury in Springfield awarded a woman
referred to in court documents as "Jane Doe" $19 million for such
violations she suffered while incarcerated at Logan Correctional Center in
Lincoln.
And how much did Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s
office initially offer to settle the suit? $10,000.
You read that right. Our state’s chief legal officer put a
value on this woman’s victimization somewhere below the price tag of a
15-year-old pickup truck.
She wasn’t just victimized by her rapist, but also by lawyers
representing the state. They pooh-poohed her trauma with a lowball offer. They
may well have been betting that the former gymnastics instructor from McHenry
County didn’t have the grit to tell a courtroom full of people what had been
done to her.
According to a report by the legal news service Law360, the
state attorney general's office offered to settle the lawsuit, at first
offering Doe $10,000, and finally $50,000.
The report didn’t say whether a shrug accompanied the
offers. But there might as well have been one.
A sick sociological calculus often accompanies negotiations
such as these. Inmates are the untouchables in the American caste system. Their
worth is seen as somehow “less than.” For some, prisoners are viewed as less
than free people. For others, less than human.
But a jury saw things differently. It awarded $8 million in
compensatory damages and $11.3 million in punitive damages against prison
counselor Richard Macleod, lead prison investigator Todd Sexton and Warden
Margaret Burke.
The civil complaint alleges when Doe would go to Macleod's
office to make phone calls to her child, he repeatedly exposed himself to her.
On two occasions, he demanded and received oral sex and two other times had
nonconsensual intercourse.
“Nonconsensual intercourse?” Oh, I hate how lawyers sanitize
the most reprehensible acts. How about just calling it what it is? Rape.
No one deserves to be raped. No one. In fact, Illinois law prohibits
sex between inmates and prison workers. Such contact is always nonconsensual.
Doe showed up in court and told her story. But McLeod was
nowhere to be seen.
"The actual perpetrator, Richard Macleod, never showed
up to defend himself," Doe’s lawyer Nicole Schult said. "So,
everything that our client alleged happened was taken as a matter of law to be
true. So, the state itself never had a chance or an opportunity to say that
none of this happened. No one in the course of this trial has ever said that
what happened to my client didn't happen.”
MacLeod left the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2018
but according to his online resume, he’s now a captain in the U.S. Army. A
relative of his tells me he’s serving in Poland.
With substantiated civil allegations like these levied
against him, why is he serving in a position of such authority? More
importantly, why hasn’t Logan County State's Attorney Bradley Hauge filed
criminal charges?
Schult said her client has never been given a reason by the
prosecutor. I reached out to Hauge to see if he would give a reason to the
folks who elected him. I never received a call back.
When a prosecutor won’t communicate with either victims or
those who elected him, one has to ask: Who does he really serve?
Well, rural Logan County has two state prisons. And
correctional officers are important constituents. Could the political clout of
the guards have this prosecutor shaking in his wingtips?
We don’t know. He’s not talking. For that matter, Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office
remains mum on the civil lawsuit.
But the jury did speak, loud and clear.
