A woman who reported being repeatedly raped by a staff member at Logan Correctional Center while she was an inmate at the Lincoln prison was awarded a $19 million judgment last month by a federal jury in Springfield.
The woman referred to in court documents as "Jane Doe" was a gymnastics instructor in McHenry County when she was sentenced to prison and now reportedly resides in Elgin.
Nicole Schult, a lawyer for the Uptown People's Law Center in Chicago, which represented Doe, said this may be a record judgment against the Illinois Department of Corrections.
"We had heard rumors of this kind of rampant sexual abuse happening at Logan since it became a women's facility," she told Illinois Times. "We also knew that these kinds of things were happening all over the state. ... It is really difficult for women in custody to report sexual assault because of the retaliation, and oftentimes, even actual punishment with segregation."
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. Doe opted for a jury trial in federal court. The $19 million was awarded after only four hours of deliberation.
"It is certainly the largest judgment that we are aware of," Schult said. "The jury was sending a message."
Schult said she anticipates the state will appeal the judgment.
Naomi Puzzello, a spokesperson for IDOC, said the department would not comment on active litigation. Annie Thompson, a press secretary for the attorney general, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The jury 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.
Doe was locked up at the Lincoln prison for most of the sentence she served in the state Department of Corrections between March 2015 and July 2018, according to her complaint. Among other duties, Macleod was responsible for coordinating and overseeing weekly court-approved phone calls between Doe and her young daughter, the lawsuit stated.
The civil complaint alleges when Doe would go to Macleod's office to make the phone calls, he repeatedly exposed himself to her. On two occasions, he demanded and received oral sex and on two other times had nonconsensual intercourse with Doe, court documents allege.
Illinois law prohibits sex between inmates and prison workers and such contact is considered nonconsensual, Schult said.
She said an Illinois State Police investigator forwarded her findings to the Logan County State's Attorney's Office but criminal charges were not filed against Macleod.
"We don't know why charges were not pursued," Schult said. Logan County State's Attorney Bradley Hauge did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sexton spoke to Doe about her experience with Macleod in early August 2017, after receiving information from an unidentified source, but Doe initially refrained from discussing Macleod's abuse because she was afraid of retaliation, she told the court.
Eventually, Doe discussed her experience with the investigator, but she was then transferred against her will to a Decatur prison, where she couldn't immediately continue her weekly phone calls or continue the cosmetology classes she had been taking at the Logan facility, her lawsuit stated.
Macleod, who is no longer employed by IDOC, did not cooperate with the litigation.
"The actual perpetrator, Richard McLeod, never showed up to defend himself," 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. The primary defenses that the two defendants, Warden Burke and Investigator Sexton (had was that) they didn't get a report, which we know from the evidence at trial was incorrect. They received a report in December of 2016 of the ongoing abuse."
Schult said she is hopeful the verdict will force IDOC to take more steps to protect inmates from sexual violence.
"There were many peer reports, in the course of discovery, that we were made aware of," she said. "(There was) a state police investigation report on many of the incidents that were substantiated. ... We had another woman, another "Jane Doe," at trial testify about being treated in a very similar way as our client was by defendant McLeod and having the same fear."
Schult added she believes the culture at Logan Correctional Center remains unchanged and that inmates fear retaliation if they report being sexually assaulted by a staff member.
"I would like to say that the things at Logan have changed. But we still see a lot of women at Logan in our office and I know that it hasn't changed, that it's still happening."
Scott Reeder, a staff writer for Illinois Times, can be reached at [email protected].
