Abused prisoner gets $3.5 million in awards
By G.
Dunkel
New York state behaved so callously, so unjustly toward
Kerry Sanders that it agreed to a settlement of $3.25 million
and an official letter of apology. The city of Los Angeles
earlier settled for $290,000.
"New York did my son injustice, and we got our justice,"
was the reaction of his mother, Mary Sanders Lee, to the
settlement.
Sanders, who is Black and from Los Angeles, suffers from
severe paranoid schizophrenia. A Los Angeles cop picked him
up in October 1993 while he was sitting on a park bench in a
confused state. He had reportedly stopped taking his
medicine.
The cop said he asked Sanders who he was and did he go by
any other name and Sanders said, "Yes, Terry and Robert." The
police found two warrants: one for Kerry Sanders on a
jaywalking violation, and the other for Robert Sanders, an
escaped prisoner from New York who was convicted of attempted
murder.
The cops didn't bother to check fingerprints.
For having the "wrong" last name and being confused by his
illness, callous negligence by the cops sent Kerry Sanders to
two years in New York prisons. Treatment for his condition
there was woefully inadequate and his disease grew worse.
Meanwhile, his mother searched the streets of Los Angeles for
her beloved son.
It wasn't until federal agents in Cleveland arrested the
real Robert Sanders in 1995 and checked his fingerprints that
the prison authorities in New York realized they had the
wrong Sanders. He was returned to his mother with $48 and the
clothes on his back. While the settlement looks like a lot of
money, most who know this story feel New York and California
should still have the responsibility of covering Sanders'
medical costs for all the damage done him.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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