$1.1-Million for Jail Abuse Upheld

In what his attorney called one more step toward a citizens’ review board, a $1.1-million award given to a former Navy chaplain who had been beaten in a Vista jail was upheld Thursday by a Superior Court judge.

Judge Barbara Gamer then added to the award by attaching to it more than $200,000 in legal fees incurred by Jim Butler, 60, in his lawsuit against the county and Sheriff John Duffy.

David B. Florance, the attorney for the defendants, said afterward that the verdict would be appealed, even though Gamer had rejected the motion for a new trial. Gamer added that interest would be assessed to any money owed to Butler, pending the outcome of an appeal or a settlement.

Butler’s victory follows the $332,000 awarded Wednesday by a Superior Court jury to a Vista woman who complained that sheriff’s deputies used excessive force in booking her into County Jail.

Tom Adler, Butler’s attorney, said that Wednesday’s North County verdict was “just icing on the cake.”

“Yes, you could say Jim and his attorney are very happy,” Adler said with a smile. “This mistake on the part of the county should finally help land a citizens’ review board, which has been needed for a long time.”

Butler has offered to give $320,000 of the $1.1 million award to offset start-up costs of a review board. The Board of Supervisors voted in July to place a measure on the November ballot that would create such a board to monitor the performance of sheriff’s deputies.

Although outgoing Sheriff Duffy is opposed to the idea, sheriff’s candidates Jim Roache and Jack Drown have said they support a review board.

“Any organization needs a system of checks and balances,” Butler said. “Our founding fathers said that about the Constitution. We have to have such a thing to check abuses of power. And in the past, Duffy has been responsible for a lot of abuses.”

Butler was jailed for less than 24 hours in January, 1985. He said the intervening five years of litigation triggered a heart attack, clinical depression and the loss of a $25,000-a-year business renovating mobile homes.

On the night of Jan. 19, 1985, Butler and his cousins were in his Vista home in the 1600 block of Foothill Drive. They were cleaning up after dinner when they heard screeching brakes and dashed outside to offer assistance to accident victims. Until that night, Butler had no arrest record.

According to Butler, he asked Deputy Robert Bishop to turn on his patrol car’s flashers and move the vehicle to the hilltop, out of the way of other cars. Butler says the response was physical and verbal abuse.

He says he was tossed into a patrol car, taken to jail and then beaten, denied access to badly needed medication for high blood pressure, and placed inside a rubber-padded cell.

He has likened the experience to rape.

Florance, the sheriff’s attorney, has characterized Butler’s behavior that night as intrusive, saying that Butler tried to give orders to deputies.

Butler, who once taught students in a Catholic high school and served as a chaplain in Vietnam, has called the ordeal worse than anything he endured in Indochina.

“I was just trying to help other people,” he said. “Because I was doing that, I got into a confrontation. When I was in jail, I was beaten badly. I suffered a dislocated shoulder. They broke my nose.

“The police like to use this term ‘attitude adjustment.’ I just hope they learn to apply the same term to their own work and forget this Rambo, shoot-em-up stuff forever.”