Missouri city agrees to pay settlement in lawsuit over role in inmate’s death

The city of Charleston, Mo., has agreed to pay its portion of a settlement in a federal lawsuit over its role in the 2017 death of a jailed inmate, according to multiple reports.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a federal judge said Wednesday she would likely approve a $500,000 partial settlement in a lawsuit which claimed that Tory Sanders, a Black inmate, was killed after a sheriff put pressure on his neck while he was restrained.

The news outlet reported that the money will go to Sanders’s mother, wife and nine children. Claims against Mississippi County, the former sheriff and jail’s staffers involved, are still pending.

According to The Associated Press, Sanders was taken to Mississippi County Jail after telling Charleston police that he needed psychiatric help. It was determined that Sanders needed to be hospitalized for observation because he was suffering from paranoia.

However, Sanders stayed in the jail, and Sheriff Cory Hutcheson led other officers and jailers to Sanders’s cell, where he was tackled, beaten and shocked with a stun gun, AP reported.

Sanders’s family specifically accused Hutcheson of pressing his left knee into Sanders’s neck for three minutes despite pleas from other officers to stop.

No charges were ever brought in the case, the AP reported, but Hutcheson was later sentenced to six months in federal prison for wire fraud and identity theft. He resigned after pleading guilty and can reportedly no longer work in law enforcement.

The incident occurred in May 2017, and has drawn comparisons to the killing of George Floyd in police custody three years later.

The AP noted that Sanders’s death was one of several that led the NAACP to issue a travel advisory warning African Americans “to beware of the safety concerns with travel in Missouri.”