Nearly 10 months after the state promised to speedily make amends to a mentally ill man who was held behind bars for years after he should have been freed, the former inmate said that the Department of Correction has made no settlement offer and that he has taken the state to court.
Rommel Jones, released four years too late without explanation or apology in July 2006, filed a lawsuit yesterday in Suffolk Superior Court, seeking punitive damages for "serious emotional and physical harm."
The department has not apologized to him, and, officials have acknowledged, Jones might never have learned of the mistake if not for a Globe inquiry earlier this year.
The suit alleges that Jones repeatedly told his jailers that they had miscalculated his release date, but prison officials "nevertheless failed to correct the mistake."
The Department of Correction would not answer questions about the lawsuit yesterday. "The specific terms of the parties' settlement proposals necessarily must be negotiated between the parties, not through the press," the department said in a prepared statement.
After the Globe's Spotlight Team began making inquiries early this year about sentence calculation errors, prison officials acknowledged that 13 other inmates had been imprisoned after their sentences had expired, one of them for more than two years after his legal release date.
James R. Pingeon, director of litigation for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, is representing Jones. Pingeon said settlement talks broke down after state lawyers insisted that Jones keep any settlement offer secret from other former inmates mistakenly held beyond their legal release date.
"Mr. Jones would like to settle this case without protracted litigation and is willing to respectfully consider any reasonable offer," Pingeon said in a letter early this month to a lawyer for the Executive Office of Public Safety. "However, by taking the position that it will not make an offer unless Mr. Jones agrees not to tell anyone about it, [the Department of Correction] has made him question whether any offer it might be willing to make would be fair."
In a Feb. 6 letter that was hand-delivered to Jones, Nancy Ankers White, general counsel for the Department of Correction, said the state was "committed to an immediate and fair resolution of any claim Mr. Jones may have." Four months later, Pingeon told state officials that Jones was willing to accept $425,000 to settle the matter quickly without having to go to court. But, Pingeon said, the state's insistence on secrecy scuttled any chance of a settlement.
"This seems to me to be inconsistent with the values of transparency and openness that [the Department of Correction] claims to live by," Pingeon said in his letter to the state.
Besides the money, Jones said he wants an apology and assurances that the problems that led to the sentence calculation errors have been corrected.
"I'll just be glad when this is over with," said Jones, 40, who now lives in a group home in Mattapan. "If this is the way the DOC does business, then they're in trouble."
In the four years he was mistakenly detained, Jones missed his mother's wake, lost contact with his teenage daughter, and endured the daily perils of life in prison, where his mental illness led to a ping-pong existence between a prison cell and the psychiatric wards of Bridgewater State Hospital.
"During the period when [Jones] was unlawfully confined, he became convinced that he should have been discharged, he decompensated psychologically, was placed on mental health watch, [and] put in four-point restraints," the lawsuit states. Four-point restraints are an extreme measure of control in which an inmate is immobilized, with hands and feet strapped down.
Pingeon said the state should honor its commitment to a speedy resolution. "They made a mistake," he said. "They should admit it, make amends, and move on. It's a government agency. It's accountable to the people, and the people have the right to know what's going on inside the DOC. Hiding behind this wall of defensiveness makes me question their commitment to really cleaning up the problems they have in sentence computation."
After the Spotlight Team report in late April, the department said it was scrapping its system for calculating inmate sentences and devising new methods to make sure prisoners serve only their legal terms. Prison officials said yesterday that they hired a new director of date computation in late August. They said they have increased training and now routinely review complex sentences to try to avoid errors like the one that ensnared Jones.
Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com.
