The City of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, will pay $550,000 to settle a lawsuit by a homeless Black man falsely arrested and jailed for 31 days for crimes he didn’t commit.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Rhode Island last week announced the settlement on behalf of Woonsocket resident Mack Blackie, who was twice arrested and detained for breaking and entering into an apartment on the strength of police reports and arrest warrants that his lawyers say purposely misidentified him.
His jail stay was protracted due his inability to afford the $100 cash bond on a $1,000 bail fee.
In August 2022, the Woonsocket apartment of William Grover and Veronica Higbie was broken into. Grover told an investigating police officer that the individual who had entered his home was known to him as “Black,” and that if he saw him again he’d be able to identify him, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island in October 2024 and obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
A week later, then-Detective Timothy Hammond, a 15-year veteran of the Woonsocket Police, followed up, asking Grover multiple times if Mack Blackie was the perpetrator. Grover — who knew both “Black” and Blackie from the neighborhood — explicitly stated it was not Blackie, a Liberian, and described the differences in physical characteristics between the two men.
Blackie is shorter, huskier, and has better teeth than Black, Grover told the officer, according to the complaint.
Officer Hammond then failed to schedule a promised photo line-up so Grover would be able to definitively identify “Black,” the lawsuit says.
Instead, Hammond falsely wrote in his witness statement that “Grover positively identified the suspect male as being Mack Blackie,” the complaint says. He also later falsely stated in his application for an arrest warrant that Grover told another Woonsocket police officer that Blackie broke into the apartment.
Blackie, a Liberian immigrant who had fallen on hard times during the pandemic after losing his job working on a delivery truck for a food distributor, was on his way get a free meal at a city park when he was arrested, reported The Public’s Radio in Rhode Island. He was arrested on Aug. 30, 2022, held in the city police station overnight, and the next morning was taken to court, where he collapsed due to complications from alcohol withdrawal.
After being hospitalized for several days, he was released, got sober and began looking for work and a permanent place to live. A few months later, he was rearrested and charged with felony breaking and entering and assault based on the same August 2022 incident. Officer Hammond still had not shown Grover or Higbie a photo of the man he had arrested for breaking into their apartment, the lawsuit says.
Because Blackie was on probation at the time, he was incarcerated for 18 days without bail as a probation violator. When bail was finally set, he could not afford the $100 cash required for release, resulting in his continued incarceration for an extra 13 days, until an employee of a nonprofit organization serving food-insecure people where he volunteered, The Milagros Project, posted the money for his bail.
In February 2023, at a pretrial conference for the criminal case, Grover and Higbie saw Blackie in the courthouse hallway. They immediately realized that Woonsocket police had arrested the wrong man.
“That’s not him,” Higbie said after spotting Blackie, then turned to him and said, “I am so sorry, honey. I am so sorry. This was never you.”
The couple informed the prosecutor, and the charges against Blackie were dropped the same day.
Hammond was later suspended for 10 days and demoted to patrol officer for “fail[ing] to follow standard investigative procedures,” Woonsocket police said in a previous statement, while telling WPRI that Hammond “accepted responsibility for his actions” and remains active on the force.
The lawsuit filed against Hammond and the City of Woonsocket argued that the actions taken against Blackie violated his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and constituted false arrest and imprisonment and malicious prosecution.
It sought a jury trial to compensate him for loss of liberty, pain and suffering, emotional distress, financial harm, and legal expenses. The suit was filed by ACLU of Rhode Island cooperating attorneys Joshua Xavier and Chloe Davis.
According to the release he signed as part of the settlement (not yet approved by the federal district judge) Blackie will receive $ $465,425 and his attorneys will receive $84,575.
“I am grateful and thankful to God for making everything successful and am happy and glad justice has been done,” Blackie, 37, said in the ACLU statement announcing the settlement.
Joshua Xavier, an attorney with the ACLU who represented Blackie, told WPRI his client plans to use the money to secure stable housing, buy a car, and start a college fund for his 14-year-old daughter.
Blackie has been sober for three years and now buses tables at an Olive Garden restaurant, reported The Public’s Radio. He is currently sleeping on a friend’s couch.
“I’ve gotten the chance to get to know [Blackie] over the course of the past two years. He is a really decent human being,” Xavier said. “He’s a great father and what happened to him is nothing less than tragic.”
The city of Woonsocket denied that it or Hammond violated Blackie’s constitutional rights in its answer to his lawsuit, and now admits no liability regarding the arrest or treatment of Blackie in the settlement. The release states that “payments and settlements in compromise are made to terminate further controversy respecting all claims for damages heretofore asserted or that may be asserted by [Blackie] because of said incident.”
Woonsocket Public Safety Director Eugene Jalette told Atlanta Black Star that Officer Hammond “acknowledged his mistake and was accountable for it,” and accepted his demotion in 2023 “without dragging out the process.”
He said the internal investigation indicated that Hammond was “maybe just overzealous,” noting that “detectives have an extremely big caseload” and “we had another victim of a crime, of a house break” at the time of Blackie’s arrest “and he thought he had the right person. Obviously he didn’t.”
“Unfortunately, Mr. Blackie spent some time in jail, and what we pride ourselves on is not making these types of mistakes, and we definitely have to avoid that in the future. We have policy and procedures in place that we feel confident that if followed, this would have never happened,” he added.
“We’re awful apologetic to the family, the Woonsocket police officers here, and to our community that we serve,” Jalette said. “It’s very unfortunate, and hopefully, he can have a brighter future.” Noting that Blackie told reporters he would spend some of the settlement funds on his daughter’s education, he said, “I’m not saying this episode will make it better, but hopefully, he can find some help and some healing and some closure with what we what he went through with the police department.”
Great Job Jill Jordan Sieder & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
