BOSTON (Legal Newsline) - A Massachusetts appeals court upheld an award of $174,000 in damages to a prison guard who claimed he was entitled to “violence pay” after he injured his shoulder attempting to carry a metal footlocker to the scene of a hostage incident.
The court rejected arguments by the Essex County Sheriff’s Department that the law required officers to actually be injured by a violent prisoner. It was enough that the plaintiff was responding to an act of violence in another part of the prison, the Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled in an Aug. 19 opinion by Justice Rachel Hershfang.
Jeffrey Howell sued Essex County after he was denied extra pay under the law providing prison officers with the equivalent of their regular salary if they receive “bodily injuries resulting from acts of violence” by prisoners in their custody. The law guarantees the difference between workers’ compensation and their full salary.
Howell was injured in 2018 after an inmate in a different building took another prisoner hostage by holding a razor blade to his neck. Another officer called Howell to carry a footlocker downstairs to address the hostage situation, but Howell injured his shoulder. A trial court granted him summary judgment on his claim for extra pay and Essex County appealed. But the appeals court agreed state law wasn’t intended to address only actual assaults by inmates on prison officers.
“Our case law makes clear that the plaintiff need not have been in the presence of the violent inmate when he injured his shoulder, and that the inmate need not have directed his violent act at the plaintiff, for the injury to have `resulted from’ the inmate's act of violence,” Justice Hershfang wrote for the court. “The officer was responding urgently, in real time, to the immediate need caused by a prisoner holding another hostage with a razor at his throat, linkage well within the ambit of the statute.”