01/28/2025
Evidence Explained: Prevailing Attorney Outlines Successful Defense in Inmate Death Case
A federal jury recently found intake and health care personnel at a Georgia jail were not at fault for the death of an inmate allegedly killed by a cellmate accused of a racially motivated hate crime.
A jury for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia reached a verdict siding with the defendants—a correctional officer, a prison nurse and her employer—sued for allegedly ignoring a risk of harm to Eddie Lee Nelson Jr., a white man, who was paired with Javon Hatchett, a Black inmate, who allegedly killed Nelson in their shared cell at the Muscogee County jail in Columbus, Georgia. Hatchett, who later told police he "fantasized about killing white men," was incarcerated for allegedly assaulting a white Auto Zone store clerk solely because of his race,according to the Nelson family's amended complaint.
Nelson's family claimed Muscogee County jail officials were aware of an imminent risk of harm to Nelson but refused to isolate Hatchett. The family sued the nurse at the jail, Kimberley Braxton, and her employer, CorrectHealth, for negligence, as well as a correctional officer, Keyvon Sellers, also accused of deliberate indifference for failing to protect Nelson of serious harm by Hatchett.
While the plaintiffs alleged it was clear that Hatchett posed a threat to Nelson's life based on his prior arrest, attorneys defending the case said the evidence presented during the trial painted a much different picture. When Hatchett first arrived at the jail after his arrest, he was initially housed with a different inmate, who also was white. There were no incidents between Hatchett and that former cellmate or anyone else before the fatal fight, the defense attorneys said.
Ted Lavender and Amy Hoffman of Lavender Hoffman Emery in Atlanta represented Braxton. Thomas Gristina and Jim Clark of Page, Scrantom, Sprouse, Tucker & Ford represented Sellers. Gristina told the Daily Report that the jury rightly found that Sellers was not liable because the officer did not know of the potential risk of harm. Evidence showed that Hatchett displayed compliant behavior at the jail and no safety concerns were raised by other inmates.
"Everybody feels terrible about what happened to Eddie Nelson. It simply wasn't Keyvon Sellers' fault," Gristina said. "He did his job and he's a really good person, and if he had perceived a threat to Eddie Nelson, he would've done something about it. We won the case because of Keyvon. He was a fantastic witness. He's 28 years old, has a great record; he's a hardworking kid [and] supports himself, and I think he was extraordinarily credible as a witness."
Lavender echoed that Hatchett was compliant with Braxton, the nurse, as shown by security footage from the jail. Following the inmates' fight, Hatchett reportedly told officers that the altercation stemmed from other issues and that racial animus wasn't a factor.
"If Hatchett did not kill Nelson for racial reasons, that severely undercuts plaintiffs’ case for what caused Nelson’s death," Lavender told the Daily Report in an email.
The plaintiffs' claims would put a challenging burden on jail staff, Gristina explained.
"If you simply base a decision on what you do with an inmate on the charges outside the jail, then why would you treat Javon Hatchett differently than the 70 or so alleged murderers we have in the jail at any given time?" Gristina asked.
"That's the critical distinction that I think has been lost in the case from the beginning," Gristina continued. "He committed a racially motivated crime outside of jail, and, therefore, he had to be isolated. But [if] you take that logic further, that would mean you have to isolate the alleged murderers as well, and what about s*x offenders or rapists?"
At the Muscogee County jail, inmates can correspond with guards about safety concerns using kiosks on jail floors.
"I think that's why the jury said no to this, that there was not a risk of substantial harm, any more than there would be for the other violent felons that we process into the jail," Gristina said.
The plaintiffs were represented by Craig Jones, a trial attorney based in Savannah, Georgia. Jones told the Daily Report that he believed the verdict may not have gone in his clients' favor because the jury may have focused too much on the deliberate-indifference standard under the constitutional claim against Sellers. In turn, that prevented jurors from assigning liability against Braxton for negligence under state law.
"My hope was that the contrast between that standard for the constitutional failure-to-protect claim and the state law negligence claim against the defendant nurse would help them split the baby and at least find that the nurse was negligent, but the jury for whatever reason decided not to do that," Jones said.
"My clients had their day in court and we lost fair and square to the jury," Jones continued. "I believe I could try this case 10 times and win 7 or 8 of them, but the cards just weren't there."
The case previously reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Last year, Judge William Pryor ruled that Nelson faced "a strong likelihood, rather than a mere possibility," of substantial harm, denying a qualified immunity defense raised by Sellers and other defendants.
-https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2025/01/24/evidence-explained-prevailing-attorney-outlines-successful-defense-in-inmate-death-case
