Dispute Over Incident Video
Broome County NY Jail officials have quietly adjusted the way they handle disputes between inmates, now that a former inmate has sued Sheriff David Harder and three jail employees who he says failed to help him during a fight with another inmate. Report from the Binghampton Press & Sun-Bulletin.
However, Harder says he doesn’t believe Broome needs to change its rules about saving video records of jail incidents. He said the cost of extra storage equipment could be prohibitive and still might not have helped resolve the incident that spurred former inmate Richard E. Sipe Jr., 28, to sue for $250,000. “We have machines set up to record the stuff that goes on in there,” Harder said. “But the lawsuit didn’t happen until several months later. The officers looked at the tape (soon after the incident), and said, ‘It’s only a bloody nose.’ How long are you going to have me save this stuff?” …
County officials said last week that a video of the incident was not retained. They later amended that to say a copy might have been made, but no one has been able to find it. State law does not require counties to retain jail videotapes, though it does require paper records to be kept for specified periods … Broome’s jail video system currently over-writes its recordings after about 30 days, unless a staffer elects to save a copy of an incident, officials have said …
Deputy County Attorney Aaron Marcus said Broome likely will release some or all of the records soon [in relation to media FOI requests]. He has said that jail employees should have retained a copy of the tape when they learned that Sipe claimed to have been assaulted, and asked for medical attention. Sipe says in court papers that he tried within three days of the incident to file charges against Mable.The county acknowledges that Sipe received attention from jail medical staff on multiple days after the incident. But it has not been able to say if he was seen because of the Mable incident.
Inmate Grievances, Inmate Lawsuits, NY Broome County, New York, Video Use
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