A Fairfax jury recently awarded a former Interstate Van Lines truck driver nearly $600,000 in a false imprisonment and malicious prosecution suit. More after the break.
Eugene Brye had been working as an independent contractor for Interstate Van Lines for about two years when he turned in his resignation with the required three week notice to the company. A few days later, as he was driving an Interstate trailer to his home in Alabama to drop off his belongings, Brye received a call from the company’s president, who ordered him to return the trailer to the company’s headquarters in Virginia. Brye refused and continued on his trip to Alabama. Meanwhile, the company had contacted the police, saying that Brye had been terminated and was driving a stolen trailer. Brye was arrested in Alabama and spent the next 34 days in jail. After the charges were dropped and he was released from jail, Brye sued Interstate for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. The jury sided with Brye, awarding him $50,000 on the malicious prosecution claim, $200,000 for false imprisonment, and $340,000 in punitive damages.
The Washington Post has a story here.
This sort of thing happens regularly to the poor people that can not afford to hire an attorney. Myself, I’ve spent approximately 4 months out of the last twelve in a county jail here in Alabama, due to false arrest made by local law enforcement officers in Chambers and Lee County. Attorney are not available to the poor to do battle with the government. The corruption that goes on, particularly to the poor, is tremendous.
Several years ago I got accused of slapping a 15 year old teenager, whom is the prosecutors nephew. I got acquitted of the charges, ( TWO YEARS LATER), but still I spent 4.5 years in prison over that false arrest, based on the an illegal probation violation. That violaion was the arrest for the fase charges.
I spent the following four and a half years in the Federal Courts. Representing myself because I didn’t have money for a lawyer and because the corrupt government officials that got envolved are so big that they had control of the federal (District and 11th Circuit) judges that interceptted my cases as soon as they hit the courts.
If I wer black the NAACP would have been there for me and things would have been different. The ACLU of Atlanta didn’t help; on the contrary, they stole evidense I sent them to prove an 11th Circuit Judge was conspiring with others to violate my rigts in order to protect the other corrupt government officials that had gotten involved.
Your story is good but the unwritten facts makes it minute, really. Apply that money to prosecuting the corrupt government officials that allowed/ allow that sort of thing to happen, then you will really have did something toward combatting the problem.