After Years Of Fighting, Cherokee County Officials Settle Jail Beating Suit

For years, officials in Cherokee County fought a lawsuit filed by a man badly beaten in their jail in 2011, but records indicate the case appears to have been settled a few weeks before it was scheduled for trial.

The lawsuit, Bosh v. Cherokee County Governmental Building Authority, has languished in federal court for nearly five years, with county representatives facing court sanctions several times for officials’ failure to testify and for willful destruction of security video that jailers had a legal duty to preserve.

The minutes of a special meeting of the Cherokee County Governmental Building Authority held Monday in Tahlequah indicate the lawsuit was discussed in executive session, and when the executive session ended, the authority approved a resolution for a “settlement agreement.”

Federal court records also indicate that “the parties have negotiated a resolution.”

The Frontier

Daniel Bosh first sued the jail operators in 2011, after one of his vertebrae was crushed and he went two days without medical treatment after being beaten by his jailers in Cherokee County.

Federal court records show a judge ordered officials for the Cherokee County Governmental Building Authority to appear at the federal courthouse in Muskogee on Jan. 20.

A court reporter was at the federal courthouse preparing to take depositions from those officials on Jan. 20 when discussions began to “resolve the matter,” attorneys for Bosh’s estate said.

“I can’t discuss the specific terms, but the family is pleased with the result,” attorney J. Spencer Bryan said.

Bosh was beaten while handcuffed in 2011 by a group of officers at the Cherokee County Detention Center. He had been booked into jail after a traffic stop for not paying court fines.

12/14/2011 Related Story: Booking Video Released In Lawsuit Against Cherokee County Jail

Bosh was smashed into a counter, then body-slammed onto the floor. Jailers allegedly took him into another room and continued the beating, punching him and pulling his legs out so that he fell backward onto the floor. He wasn’t taken to a hospital for two days, and had suffered a spinal burst fracture.

What attorneys for Bosh learned shortly after his death is that security cameras that captured his beating had additional angles that jailers chose not to preserve or show to investigators.

The footage was destroyed before it could be used as evidence or examined by outside law enforcement officers, and jailers had a legal duty to preserve this evidence, Bosh’s attorneys argued.

Because the additional camera angles weren’t uncovered until years after Bosh initially filed a lawsuit against the county, a federal judge issued sanctions in August 2015 after determining the jailers’ actions counted as “spoliation” of evidence.

Records show the settlement agreement may waive thousands of dollars in sanctions issued against the jail authority, but the county could still end up paying thousands of dollars in attorney fees for Bosh’s estate.

Attorneys for Bosh’s estate have previously filed motions seeking to recover nearly $100,000 in attorney fees and costs.

Records do not detail the amount of the proposed settlement approved by the Cherokee County Governmental Building Authority. A joint status report filed in 2011 estimated the “amount in controversy” at $605,568.22. That figure has likely increased substantially after five years of litigation.