Meadows v. Coppick

In this § 1983 case, Tommy Meadows alleged that he had been brutally abused by corrections officers while an inmate at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.  Mr. Meadows brought claims against multiple corrections officers, including Eighth Amendment cruel-and-unusual-punishment claims against one officer who slammed Mr. Meadows’s head into a concrete wall and floor and against another who repeatedly blasted him with OC spray after he was handcuffed, shackled, bloodied, and placed in a “strip cell.”  Mr. Meadows also brought a First Amendment claim against a third officer who, in retaliation for Mr. Meadows’s attempts to file complaints regarding the assaults, had submitted a fabricated report alleging that he had overheard Mr. Meadows plotting to murder a corrections officer in order to achieve the “goal” of being placed on death row.  As a resulted of this false report, Mr. Meadows was placed in solitary confinement for approximately two years.

After previous counsel abruptly dropped the case, Emmett joined forces with Peter Pattakos to take it up.  Emmett drafted the brief opposing Defendants’ motion for summary judgment and successfully persuaded the Court to deny summary judgment with regard to the main claims against all three primary defendants.  Even after summary judgment was thus denied, the defense refused to engage in meaningful settlement negotiations, contending that there was no precedent assigning significant value to claims like these.  Emmett and Mr. Pattakos—an experienced trial lawyer—accordingly took the case to trial, where the jury awarded over $400,000 in compensatory and punitive damages to Mr. Meadows.