In a new investigative series, the Alabama Reflector analyzed state financial records and identified 94 lawsuits against state employees involving complaints of excessive force that have settled since 2020, costing Alabama taxpayers millions.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Alabama in December 2020 after finding the state had “failed or refused to correct the unconstitutional conditions” in its prisons, including overcrowding, violence and sexual abuse, and the all-too-frequent use of excessive force by correctional officers.
Since 2020, the Alabama Reflector reports, the Alabama Department of Corrections has spent more than $39.7 million to pay private lawyers and law firms to fight the DOJ suit and other class-action lawsuits against the department.
But that’s not the total cost to taxpayers of ADOC’s refusal to address violence in the state’s prisons.
The four-part “Blood Money” series—based on investigative journalist Beth Shelburne’s monthslong investigation into state financial records and federal case files—revealed that legal fees and settlements in lawsuits against correctional officers and prison administrators cost taxpayers another $17 million.
As an article detailing the reporting methodology explains, legal services to defend an entire state agency against a lawsuit—like the Justice Department’s suit against ADOC—are paid out of Alabama’s General Fund budget.
But when officers and other state employees are sued individually by incarcerated people or their families, the cost of private defense lawyers and monetary settlements is paid out of the General Liability Trust Fund, which pools annual premiums collected from participating state agencies.
Open records requests were used to obtain records of GLTF transactions from the Department of Finance. The records revealed that, between 2020 and 2024, ADOC’s claims from the GLTF totaled $17.4 million—more than any other state department.
The amount of ADOC’s claims more than quadrupled from the preceding five-year period’s total of $2.9 million.
And the number of ADOC’s claims has also skyrocketed—from 33 in 2020 to 235 in 2023, the latest year with complete data.
As a result, even as the agency’s staff has shrunk by 20%, the Reflector reports that ADOC’s premiums to participate in the trust fund have tripled, from $1.1 million in 2015 to $4.4 million in 2024.
“I think it’s fair to ask, how much is too much?” Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, a member of the state’s Joint Prison Oversight Committee, told Ms. Shelburne. “It’s hard to imagine that we were intending to create a fund that just allows us to be in a perpetual state of lawsuits forever. When does the state of Alabama start demanding results from these lawsuits?”
“Inconceivable” Levels of Excessive Force
By connecting data from the GLTF transactions with federal court records, the Reflector identified a total of 124 lawsuits against ADOC employees that resulted in settlements paid during the five-year period between 2020 and 2024.
And while a settlement is not an admission of liability, these lawsuits address the same conditions that underlie the Justice Department’s lawsuit, especially the frequent use of excessive force.
“All too often, correctional officers use force in the absence of a physical threat while making no effort to de-escalate tense situations,” federal prosecutors reported in 2019. “Such uses of force heighten tensions in already violent and overcrowded prisons. Correctional officers also use force as a form of retribution and for the sole purpose of inflicting pain.”
The Reflector found that of the 124 settled lawsuits, 94 involved complaints of excessive force.
“That sounds extreme, in my experience,” retired head of Washington’s corrections department Steve Sinclair said. “It’s pretty routine to have lawsuits for various reasons, and not all of those are legit lawsuits. But certainly not 60 or 80 plus. It’s inconceivable to me.”
The first article in the series documents the number and the nature of these lawsuits, the outcomes, and the cost to taxpayers.
45%
45% of lawsuits detailed injuries so severe the victims required hospitalization
19
19 complaints described traumatic head and brain injuries
7
At least 7 suits involved catastrophic traumas that left victims permanently disabled or disfigured
The series includes deep reporting on the people involved in the suits and what happened to them—and provides striking examples from court filings, including:
- An officer at Ventress handcuffed an incarcerated man behind his back before striking him from behind, “breaking his jaw in two places, sending a large portion of his jawbone between his teeth and spraying blood all over the wall.”
- In 2018, two officers at Staton sprayed a man in their custody with pepper spray, beat him with batons, and kicked and stomped him, leading to bleeding in the brain, multiple fractures to his ribs, face, head, and back, and damage to his lungs, and leaving him “bedridden, unable to verbally communicate, and minimally conscious” in long-term care at a VA hospital.
- During a raid by ADOC’s “Correctional Emergency Response Team” at Holman, a man who uses a wheelchair alleged in a handwritten complaint that officers slapped him and then hit him in the head with a baton. “That blow busted my head and caused me to fall out of my wheelchair flat on the floor face down,” he wrote. “They kicked and stomped on me so viciously until I defecated on myself. I was knocked out unconscious.”
“A Horrible Culture” of Impunity
The third article in the series focuses on the case of Koty Williams, whose lawsuit alleging that a group of correctional officers beat him in the barbershop at Bibb Correctional Facility and broke his hip is one of the 94 settled excessive force suits.
The officer he identified as the primary assailant has been named in six excessive force lawsuits, according to the article. Settlements to end five of those suits cost Alabama taxpayers over $198,000. But despite the ADOC commissioner’s attempts to demote and then fire him, the officer still works for the department.
This pattern of failing to hold officers accountable even when they repeatedly engage in excessive force is detailed in the second article, which identifies 10 officers involved in excessive force lawsuits that settled after 2020 who are still working for ADOC.
The Reflector found that the largest excessive force settlement since 2020 was paid to the mother of Steven Davis after her son was beaten to death by a group of officers. Among them was Roderick Gadson, who three months earlier was involved in a beating that resulted in a broken leg and nose and fractures in the victim’s hand that required surgery and led to a lawsuit that settled for $10,000.
Alabama taxpayers funded a $250,000 settlement to Steven Davis’s mother. But Gadson was not terminated or penalized—he was promoted to lieutenant. He was identified as one of five officers who were promoted after being named in an excessive force lawsuit.
The culture of impunity in Alabama’s prison system helps explain why, even as the prison population has declined, use of force incidents have soared.
“Excessive force should always be treated like a big deal,” Mr. Sinclair said. “If you tolerate or minimize it, that’s what builds a horrible culture. And you shouldn’t have to wait for a court to tell you.”
Public Resources to Pay Private Lawyers—Not to Improve Prisons
Rather than hold officers and leadership accountable, records reveal that the State of Alabama is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to defend against civil rights lawsuits—to the tune of $57 million on legal expenses since 2020.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office and the Division of Risk Management decide how to use the GLTF, a public resource funded with taxpayer dollars. And increasingly, the Reflector reports, they are deciding to use public funds to pay private lawyers hired by the attorney general’s office through no-bid contracts.
Payments to attorneys defending ADOC personnel in lawsuits far outstrip settlement payments to incarcerated people or their families.
Since 2020, legal expenses to defend ADOC officers accused of excessive force and failure to protect incarcerated people from harm or death amounted to $12.9 million, the Reflector found, while settlement payments totaled just $4.4 million.
With private lawyers billing by the hour, the GLTF has become more of a “pot of gold” for law firms than a fund to compensate victims, Hank Sherrod, who represents incarcerated people and their families in lawsuits against correctional officers, told Ms. Shelburne.
As Alabama’s prison crisis continues unabated, this reporting calls much-needed attention to the increasing use of public resources and taxpayer dollars to defend ADOC employees against serious allegations—rather than to meaningfully address the widespread failures that perpetuate violence and excessive force in the state’s prisons.
The record number of excessive force cases resulting in paid settlements since 2020 should be a red flag to state officials, former ADOC Warden David Wise told Ms. Shelburne.
“And the system needs that money, not for lawsuits, it needs that money to make it better.”