The State - News from Aug. 29, 1985

Holding that officials can be liable for errors due to “deliberate indifference,� a federal appeals court reinstated $2,090 in damages for a man who was kept in a California prison almost five years too long. An 11-member panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a jury’s award of damages, plus $45,000 in attorney’s fees, for former prisoner Frank Haygood against two records officers at Folsom Prison who investigated his complaint. Although state courts concluded that Haygood’s sentence was nearly five years too long, the two officers were held liable only for the final 17 months after Haygood complained that he was being wrongly held. Haygood, who had spent more than 20 years in state prisons on forgery, robbery, weapons and escape convictions since 1946, was freed a month after a July, 1975, ruling of the California Supreme Court that said his sentence should have ended in October, 1970.