ST. LOUIS — An appeals court has denied a new trial for Lincoln County, which had challenged a jury's award of $2.25 million to victims of sexual abuse committed by a former lieutenant at the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 27 sided with a district court ruling from the Eastern District of Missouri that denied the county's motion for judgment as a matter of law or alternatively, a new trial.
According to background information in the ruling, the victims, identified as S.M., K.W., K.S. and L.M., had been participants in Lincoln County's Adult Drug Court – an alternative court handling drug cases. They sued the county claiming that former Lt. Scott Edwards had violated their substantive due-process rights by repeatedly sexually abusing them while he served as a "tracker," or monitor, of drug court participants.
S.M. was awarded $750,000 in damages, and K.W., K.S. and L.M. were each awarded $500,000.
The ruling indicates that Edwards is serving a 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to exploiting his tracker position to gain the trust of the plaintiffs as participants in the drug court and then coercing their submission to sexual assaults.
"It is undisputed that Edwards 'deprived plaintiffs of a clearly established constitutional right to substantive due process when he committed an egregious, nonconsensual entry into the body which was an exercise of power without any legitimate governmental objective,'” the ruling states.
Edwards' duties included curfew checks at participants' homes at 10 p.m.; searches of their homes, refrigerators and trash; conducting on-site urine-analysis tests; making compliance reports to the court; and if violations occurred, taking participants into custody, the ruling states. The drug court would sanction and punish those who were noncompliant, measures that would include jail time.
Some of the sexual assaults occurred while the plaintiffs were incarcerated as a drug court sanction, the ruling states, as well as on curfew checks.
The assaults were not initially reported because plaintiffs believed Edwards "held power over them at the Drug Court," the ruling states.
During the three-day trial, jurors were asked to assess Lincoln County’s liability for these "egregious violations," the ruling states.
"The jury found that Lincoln County was deliberately indifferent to an obvious risk that the County’s failure to supervise Edwards would result in these violations of plaintiffs’ rights," the ruling states.
The three-judge panel that included James Loken, Diana Murphy and Michael Melloy concluded that it must "uphold the verdict unless it has no legally sufficient evidentiary basis."