Henderson Police sued over prisoner mistreatment

A federal ACLU lawsuit has been filed against the Henderson Police Department alleging a female prisoner was unnecessarily pepper sprayed, beaten and improperly strip searched when she did nothing but ask to use a telephone.

The lawsuit, filed Friday on behalf of Lisa Ellen Gager, charges the department conspired to cover up the Feb. 13, 1996 incident that began after her arrest on a child abuse charge of slapping her then-14-year-old son. That charge eventually was dismissed.

The action, however, goes beyond Gager's case, alleging Henderson police have "an officially sanctioned policy" allowing prisoners to be "unnecessarily assaulted, battered, beaten, humiliated, violated, summarily punished by excessive force and otherwise deprived of their civil and constitutional rights."

Officers bragged about what they had done and a booking clerk who witnessed the incident was never interviewed as part of a one-day internal investigation, the lawsuit contended.

At a news conference Wednesday announcing the lawsuit, Gager said she was pursuing the civil rights lawsuit in hopes of preventing similar actions against other prisoners.

ACLU director Gary Peck called the treatment of Gager "utterly outrageous and plainly in violation of the constitution and the law as interpreted by federal courts."

Henderson Police Chief Tommy Burns, although declining to comment on specific allegations because the case now is in the court system, said it has been "established through expert opinion and national standards that the officers acted properly."

Burns said the term "strip search" is inaccurate in the case because the issue with Gager was what he described as her unwillingness to change voluntarily from civilian clothes to a jail uniform before being moved from a holding cell.

"She didn't want to move and we had to use necessary force," said Jack Brooks, president of the Henderson Police Officers Association. "The officers did nothing wrong. They were quite professional."

Gager didn't complain about the incident at the time and it didn't surface until former jail employee Jack Goslin released a copied videotape of the incident to a television station in May.

The day after the media contacted Henderson police about the incident and the videotape, a search warrant was obtained and Goslin's home searched under the premis that he had committed petty theft, the lawsuit stated. Police, however, knew the original video was in their possession.

The lawsuit, filed through attorney Cal Potter, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages in excess of $100,000.

Potter alleged that Henderson police and the Henderson Detention Center failed to institute a policy specifying when strip searches can be conducted and ensuring that they are conducted "in the least humiliating and least intrusive manner possible."

In addition to Gager's case, there also is a legal action against the Henderson Police Department filed by Goslin and Mary Guirsch, a former booking officer at the jail. Both claim they were urged to falsify their accounts of the incident to support the officers.

Brooks noted there were several other witnesses who support what the officers did.

He added that his association is looking into the possibility of filing its own lawsuit against those who have taken on the department.

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