THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 23, 1994 TAG: 9411230475
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 119 lines
A federal jury on Tuesday awarded $90,000 to one of two South Norfolk men who were raped, sodomized and beaten for four hours by inmates in a crowded Chesapeake jail cellblock while a nearby guard, ignoring their screams, drank coffee and read a newspaper.
The civil lawsuit claimed that the two defendants, former Deputy Richard Still and Lt. John Gregory, had deprived the victim of his constitutional right to due process.
Still was on duty the night of the assault. Gregory made the decision to place the two victims - white men aged 18 and 22 - in Cellblock T, an all-black cellblock nicknamed ``The Thunderdome'' after a futuristic caged arena where men fought to the death in the movie ``Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome.''
After four hours of deliberation Tuesday, the jury of seven women and one man found that Still, a 24-year-old who now lives in Indiana, was grossly negligent because he failed to check on the inmates every half-hour as required by jail policy.
Gregory, the jurors decided, was not at fault.
Cellblock T had cells and beds for only 10 inmates, but housed 24 on Dec. 7, 1992, when the two men were assaulted. Most of the inmates slept on mattresses on the floor of a day area in front of the locked cells. The plaintiff, a short, blond 20-year-old whose first name is Steve, and his friend, a gaunt, hollow-eyed 24-year-old named Randy, were the only white men on the block that night.
According to their testimony and to the testimony of other witnesses called to substantiate their claims, the two men noticed that, after the lights went out in Cellblock T, the other inmates kept their shoes on. After 10 minutes, as Steve entered a shower stall at the corner of the cellblock, the inmates began shaking the bars and shouting out a rhythmic step-dance chant from the Spike Lee movie ``School Daze.''
``Woof, Woof, Daddy Longstroke,'' went the chant. As the noise rose to fill the dark cellblock, Nathan Wyche, an inmate known as ``Pluck,'' reached into the shower and grabbed Steve.
Randy got up to help Steve, but was stopped by a group of men who stomped on him, smashed his head on a table and stuffed something down his throat after he screamed for help.
Grasping Steve's long blond hair, Wyche dragged him across the room to Randy and slammed their heads together in an effort to make the two kiss. Both men were stripped naked and made to walk a gantlet of inmates who grabbed at them, punched them and beat them with shoes. Dazed and bleeding, they were then raped, sodomized and beaten for 3 1/2 to four hours.
At one point, said the men, the inmates tied a sheet into a noose and put it around their necks, vowing to avenge the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers.
``Every time they would hit us or jump us or beat us down, I would cry and scream,'' Steve testified.
``But everyone else was making so much noise, I don't know if they could hear us. It was like a game to them. They were shaking the bars. Singing. It was like they knew we were coming and they rehearsed it all.''
After Steve was raped, ``he let out a small cry,'' Randy testified. ``I saw the tears in his eyes and I saw what I knew of him from before go vacant. It was just vacant.''
Following the attack, the men said, the inmates made them shower and clean up the blood-splattered cellblock with sheets. At 5:30 a.m., a jail trusty who came to the block to deliver breakfast trays discovered the two, beaten and bleeding, and notified the deputy. The men were removed from the cellblock, but not before the inmates warned them that they would be hurt even more if they told what happened.
The attack left Steve with torn anal tissue, damage to his intestines, a dislocated shoulder, a pierced eardrum and diminished sight in his left eye. Criminal charges were brought against five of the inmates.
In July of 1993, Wyche, 34, was convicted of malicious wounding, three counts of forcible sodomy and two counts of forcible sodomy as a principle in the second degree. He was sentenced to five life terms plus 20 years.
Another inmate, John Eason, pleaded guilty to two counts of sodomy and was sentenced to 45 years. Two more participants - Andre Sturdevant and Eric Hill - were convicted of unlawful wounding and sentenced to two years each. The last, Tony Davis, was convicted of assault and sentenced to 12 months.
During closing arguments Tuesday, defense attorneys John A. Gibney, Jr. and Robert Dybing argued that Deputy Still had made his rounds on the night of the assault, but that he never saw the victims because the inmates held them down and covered them with sheets each time he showed up.
Portraying Steve and Randy as drug users and criminals with no track record of truth-telling, Gibney argued that the two men were ``fast and loose with the facts,'' and less worthy of belief than the deputies who testified for the defense.
Steve and Randy embellished the events of their night in the Thunderdome and exaggerated their psychological harm so they could win a lot of money in a lawsuit, Gibney said. Steve, he argued, had psychological problems before he ever got to the Thunderdome.
Steve, who was 18 at the time of the attack, testified that he has become withdrawn and depressed, that he screams in his sleep, and that he has recurrent flashbacks.
``I just felt like all my pride was taken away,'' he testified. ``. . . I was numb. I didn't feel nothing.''
His attorney, Jeffrey Breit, expressed a similar reaction to Tuesday's verdict. Breit had hoped for an award of up to $5 million.
``I'm very disappointed in the results,'' he said.
``It's impossible for me to understand that, in this day and age, a boy who was violated the way he was can wind up with such a low verdict. . . . I feel very badly for him because that type of an award isn't going to cover his future problems, much less what he's had to go through.
``They clearly felt that he was not an ideal citizen. And they just didn't feel like giving someone like that a lot of money.''
One juror, who asked not to be identified, said she thought that the jury should have awarded more money. But, she said, the jurors had difficulty deciding on a dollar amount because they had no idea how much the plaintiff was requesting.
``We had nothing to base our decision on,'' she said.
Federal court rules in the Eastern District of Virginia do not allow attorneys to suggest award amounts to juries.
KEYWORDS: SEX CRIME RAPE CIVIL LAWSUIT
CHESAPEAKE CITY JAIL
by CNB