Man awarded nearly $900,000 for 1996 jail
beating
11/13/99 -- 5:23 PM
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - A federal court jury awarded a mentally impaired man nearly
$900,000 after finding that a former Polk County jailer used excessive force to subdue him
in 1996. After three hours of deliberations, jurors returned the verdict against Ed Otte,
who worked for the Polk County Sheriff's Office as a corrections officer at the Polk
County Jail in Bartow when the February 1996 incident took place.
Attorneys for Roger Livingstone, 53, argued before U.S. District Judge Henry Lee
Adams Jr. Friday that Otte used excessive force on Livingstone that resulted in brain
damage.
Otte is now a correctional officer in Colorado.
The jury awarded Livingstone $796,132 for past and future medical costs and
$50,000 each for past pain and suffering and future pain and suffering.
Livingstone's attorneys had asked for $2.2 million.
Livingstone attorney Mike Martin told jurors Livingstone was ``battered until he
was comatose'' because he was yelling in his cell.
But Sheriff's Office attorney Hank Campbell told jurors Livingstone, 53, had
substantial brain damage caused by two strokes he had suffered in late 1995, and that the
injuries he received at the jail were not permanent.
Livingstone, who now lives in a secured nursing home in St. Petersburg, was
arrested after he walked away from an assisted-living facility in Winter Haven to a nearby
department store.
There, he grabbed a woman around the waist, a woman he mistakenly thought he
knew.
Livingstone was charged with battery and resisting arrest. Those charges later
were dropped.
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