A federal lawsuit filed by a former Baxter County jail inmate alleging he was the victim of excessive force while locked up in the facility has been settled.
Details of the settlement agreement were not made public, according to electronic records of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Arkansas.
Twenty-two-year-old Gregory Mayfield and the defendant, Ethan Raymond, signed a joint motion to dismiss the suit earlier this month.
MAYFIELD’S FEDERAL COURT SUIT
There were a number of people in the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office originally named in Mayfield’s suit. The attorney representing the employees filed a motion for summary judgment in late August 2020 asking that all of Mayfield’s allegations be dismissed.
In a ruling released December 29, 2020, Federal District Judge Timothy Brooks said only two of the large number of allegations made by Mayfield could proceed to trial. Judge Brooks dismissed all of the defendants from the suit except for Sgt. Ethan Raymond, who was a jailer at the time the alleged incidents took place.
Judge Brooks ruled that an excessive force claim in which Mayfield says Raymond struck him on the side of the head on Dec. 7, 2019 could be tried.
Raymond has consistently denied striking Mayfield, saying in one filing that no such incident ever occurred.
In his ruling, Judge Brooks noted that he could make no clear-cut decision on the alleged 2019 attack since he had only seen “two directly contradictory sworn statements regarding the incident.”
There was not enough evidence beyond the statements of Raymond and Mayfield available to either prove or refute the allegations, Judge Brooks wrote.
The court allowed only one other claim made by Mayfield to remain open – one in which he is alleged to have been intimidated by Raymond.
Raymond was accused of threatening to charge Mayfield with a major disciplinary infraction for appearing to be making threats toward jail staff.
In allowing the intimidation claim to proceed, Judge Brooks noted that after Mayfield filed a grievance on Jan. 5, 2020 alleging Raymond had violated his constitutional rights, a reply was sent to the inmate containing the words, “I hope you are not making threats toward staff that could be considered a major infraction.”
The court noted that after that message was delivered, “Mayfield filed other grievances about his conditions of confinement, but never mentioned Raymond or the alleged assault again.”
The question to be decided in this claim is “whether Jailer Raymond retaliated against Mayfield for exercising his First Amendment right to file grievances,” according to Judge Brooks.
A BLIZZARD OF GRIEVANCES
Mayfield has been in and out of the Baxter County jail through the years. He filed a blizzard of grievances while in the jail ranging from the mundane to allegations he was assaulted and his life threatened.
In a 74-day span in November and December 2019 and January and early February 2020, Mayfield filed at least 11 grievances
His complaints dealt with claims that he had not been given recreation time, been denied access to medicine, refused to be supplied with cleaning supplies, had the water in his cell shut off for three days, and had not been permitted to take showers.
Jail staff contends that Mayfield tells only part of the story in his court filings regarding the grievances.
While he alleges he was not permitted to take showers, or prohibited access to the recreation yard, it is pointed out in filings made by the attorney for the jail staff that Mayfield refused to do both at times.
Mayfield also claims water in his cell was shut off for three days, lights were left on all night and that he was supplied a plunger to flush his clogged toilet. In the motion for summary judgment, the defendants contended that water was never cut off to Mayfield’s cell for three days, that lights were only turned on briefly during bed checks, and that if any inmate was responsible for clogging the toilet in his cell, the inmate would, as a matter of routine, be given a plunger to fix the problem.
Mayfield said jail personnel withheld medicine that could have caused him to lose slight in one of his eyes. The injury to Mayfield’s eye did not happen in the jail, but when he was pistol-whipped in a Mountain Home residence.
He alleges the things that happened to him in the Baxter County jail add up to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In dismissing many of Mayfield’s allegations, Judge Brooks said he did not believe “that relatively short, sporadic deprivations of cleaning supplies, recreation, showers, access to newspapers, or the law library, and having medicine delivered late on one occasion rose to the level of constitutional violations.”
Mayfield sometimes filed grievances because he alleged he had not received copies of earlier grievances he had requested.
The jail staff contended that Mayfield would make repeated requests for the same grievances, saying he had lost the ones originally provided to him.
During his many appearances in Baxter County Circuit Court, Mayfield always voiced one or more complaints regarding his treatment at the county jail.
The attorney representing the staff members at the jail earlier filed a general denial of all of Mayfield’s allegations.
The attorney then filed the motion for summary judgment. It was on this motion that Judge Brooks issued his ruling in December 2020.
SECTION 1983 LAWSUIT
Mayfield’s filing with the federal court is commonly referred to as Section 1983 litigation, since it is based on Section 1983 of the U.S. Code.
Section 1983 permits prisoners to sue correctional officials when conditions of confinement fail to meet constitutional standards in a number of areas — including physical security, medical care and freedom of religious expression.
At one point, Mayfield asked the court to appoint an attorney for him since he had no funds to hire one. The request was denied. There is no constitutional right to an attorney in a civil case such as the one filed by Mayfield.
Legal experts say many of the Section 1983-based lawsuits are frivolous, having no basis in law or fact. One judge was quoted as saying; Section 1983 allegations are mainly “brought by people with too much time on their hands.”
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