Ohio inmate who said prison guards beat, pepper sprayed him while handcuffed settles suit

An Ohio prison inmate, who said he was attacked by multiple corrections officers while handcuffed, has settled a lawsuit he filed against the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

Attorneys for Toby Lamb II say the beating was brutal and “without justification” and left him seriously injured. They say prison officials then tried to prevent Lamb from pursuing grievances against the officers, placing him in solitary confinement and effectively silencing him.

The settlement, signed in June and finalized this month, comes four years after the lawsuit was filed.

In 2021, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit after the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction argued that Lamb didn’t properly follow the rules of the prison’s grievance system. But the 6 ^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, saying a jury could find that Lamb had tried to comply with the grievance system.

“Toby Lamb experienced what so many of our clients have reported to us over the years – misconduct and abuse by prison officials, followed by suppression of any attempt to report the abuse,” his attorney, Jacqueline Greene, said in a statement. “We hope that ODRC and its wardens and inspectors put an end to this type of abuse by prison guards and to the silencing of those who dare to report it.”

According to settlement documents, the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction will pay $30,000, with neither side admitting liability. The agency denies any fault or wrongdoing.

The lawsuit surrounded a series of incidents that happened in 2018 at the Warren Correctional Institution in Warren County, where Lamb was serving 13½ years for aggravated robbery.

On April, 6, 2018, Lamb was involved in a physical confrontation with a corrections officer. Sometime after, he said, two other officers placed him in a painful position and walked him outside into the night – out of view of surveillance cameras.

They used his head “like a battering ram” to open a door, Lamb’s attorneys said, and directed racial slurs at him. Lamb is Black.

Once outside, while he was handcuffed, he said the officers kicked and punched him and used pepper spray. At least three other guards, according to Lamb, joined in the beating, with one holding him on the ground as another sprayed his face with pepper spray.

Later that night, the 42-year-old was transferred to a different prison and placed in solitary confinement.

Lamb’s attorneys said being placed in “the hole” meant he wasn’t able to respond to a prison official who contacted him using the prison’s online message system, JPay. Lamb couldn’t access it in solitary. He had made an informal complaint that led the prison official to respond. Lamb said he didn’t receive that official’s message until almost two years later.

His attorneys said corrections officers effectively denied him access to the prison grievance system, and then state prison officials exploited a federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, intended to control the number of frivolous lawsuits filed by prisoners.

The 6 ^th Circuit, however, said he had been prevented from trying to comply with the grievance system because prison officials made the system unavailable to him.

Lamb’s attorneys noted that Lamb pleaded guilty for his attack on the corrections officer. They called the actions of the corrections officers “illegal, brutal and unjust."

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Ohio inmate who said prison guards beat, pepper sprayed him while handcuffed settles suit