Michael Mineo's $440 million lawsuit against the NYPD—which accused cops of sodomizing him with a retractable police baton while arresting him in a Brooklyn subway station—was shot down yesterday by a federal civil jury. Not only was the tattoo artist/body piercer denied any settlement money, but the judge ordered him to pay the legal fees for three of the four cops he sued. Attorneys for the officers estimate their fees to be in excess of $100,000. In short, Mineo's pretty much screwed and tattooed.
The three officers, Alex Cruz, Andrew Morales and Richard Kern, were previously acquitted of criminal charges relating to the October 2008 incident, which began when the cops noticed him smoking marijuana outside the Prospect Park subway station, and Mineo ran. After five days of deliberations, jurors did find Officer Kern liable for malicious prosecution for giving Mineo a summons for marijuana, but Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein tossed the verdict. The judge also called Mineo's accusations against the other cops "patently frivolous."
But this is interesting: Despite clearing the other officers, eleven of the jurors were convinced Mineo was in fact sodomized. "I was pretty much convinced that something happened," one juror told the Post. "One person thought he didn’t do it." According to the Daily News, that lone holdout is the wife of an NYPD school safety officer. In the end, the jury deadlocked 11-1 on a charge of excessive force against Officer Kern, who was the cop accused of shoving the baton into Mineo's rectum. Kern will be retried for those charges.
Mineo's attorneys also argue that the NYPD tampered with Mineo's boxer shorts to make the hole seem as though it could not have been made by the baton. Judge Weinstein will ask the U.S. attorney's office to investigate the tampering claims, and the new civil trial of Officer Kern will not begin until the tampering investigation is completed, lawyers tell the Times Union.
