Agreement between Spokane County and estate for Trent Yohe’s surviving daughter will fund her college education.
Spokane County Commissioners voted this afternoon, without comment, to accept a a $50,000 settlement negotiated with the Center for Justice in the case of Trent Yohe, a 37 year-old Spokane man who died three years ago following a violent arrest by Spokane County sheriff’s deputies.
The settlement resolves federal and state claims the Center filed in federal district court on behalf of Yohe’s estate last June. The claims stem from a May 12, 2007 incident in which Yohe is reported to have had a seizure as deputies gained entry into a trailer where he’d been sleeping. As they tried to forcibly remove him, Yohe was tasered at least four times by deputies and, as a result of the altercation, one his ribs was fractured. He lost consciousness and died 12 days later in a local hospital.
Although Yohe’s case has often been mentioned alongside the case of Otto Zehm–a 36 year-old janitor who was killed in a March 2006 altercation with Spokane police–the Center’s Chief Catalyst Breean Beggs said today that there were a number of differences between the two incidents that, in his opinion, posed clear risks for the plaintiffs had the case gone to trial.
To begin with, Beggs said, sheriff deputies had a warrant for Yohe’s arrest on charges of check forgery, whereas in the Zehm case police clearly had no right to even attempt to take the janitor into custody. Secondly, a blood sample revealed high levels of methamphetamine in Yohe’s bloodstream. And even though there were compelling eye witness accounts to the violence of Yohe’s arrest, Beggs said, there is nothing like the security camera videotape that is a centerpiece of the evidence that Zehm was assaulted by one or more police officers. (The Center is actively representing the Zehm estate in a federal civil suit seeking damages for violations of Zehm’s civil rights.)
“Another difference,” Beggs added, “is that in this case we have this minor, pre-teen daughter. Basically, what this settlement does is it will invest sufficient money for her [after attorney fees and costs] to pay for her college education. That’s the settlement we have in hand, and it’s a pretty good bird in the hand.”
Beggs gave much of the credit for the settlement to Spokane County.
“What was different in this case,” he said, “is that the county approached us, fairly early after the case was filed and said, ‘you know, before we spend a lot of money at the county on it, and before you spend a lot of money on it, on experts and things like that, let’s talk settlement.’”
Those negotiations led to the creative solution that secured Yohe’s daughter’s college funds because it allowed Beggs and the Center for Justice to approach the state Department of Social Health Services to help secure a key piece. That piece was this: Trent Yohe’s unpaid medical bills came to about $109,000, an obligation DSHS had assumed because Yohe was indigent at the time of his death. However, had the case gone to trial and the jury awarded money to the Yohe estate, that award would have been subject to a state lien for the medical bills.
“In terms of how much money would have wound up in this investment fund for the daughter,” Beggs said, “it could have been zero. So this is another example how in settling a case you be more creative than if you’d just gone to trial.”
There was yet another piece, Beggs said, that was important to both the Center and the client, in this case the daughter’s mother. It was a reasonable assurance that the county was committed to taking the training steps and making the policy changes to avoid future such tragedies involving arrest subjects, like Yohe, who are experiencing seizures.
“County officials told us that they have changed their policies and their training to try to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again,” Beggs said. “And it mostly had to do with two things. One, how they confront people who are exhibiting these kind of manic behaviors and, secondly, how quickly they call for medical personnel who can closely monitor the subjects. Once we had those assurances, then the question became: ‘what more would be accomplished by going to trial?’”
–CFJ
No comments yet.