At last, former inmate gets the state to pay up
Daryl Davis was a decade into his 37-year sentence for aggravated assault when he was attacked in Texas’ Polunsky prison facility in Livingston.
The first time, the Mandingo Warriors gang used a broom handle to beat him. Days later, they pummeled him using a magnet stuffed into the end of a sock.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice transferred Davis to another unit for protection. To the Tyler native known inside as “Major,” the assaults didn’t make sense. He wasn’t affiliated with any gang. He started asking around.
The prison’s hyperactive rumor mill soon spit out an explanation: A guard who had accepted an inmate’s bribe for favors believed — wrongly — that Davis had turned him in. Seeking retaliation, the guard paid the gang in smoking tobacco to attack Davis.
The discovery launched Davis on an improbable DIY legal journey that lasted a decade and a half. Representing himself in federal court, he prevailed over state attorneys at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, known for its conservative bent.
At trial, he summoned the same gang members who had beaten him to describe how they’d been hired by the guard. Convinced, the jury awarded Davis $25,000 for the attack.
That was just the start. For the next dozen years, Davis tried to get the state to pay up. He filed petitions and wrote letters from his cell.
Davis served 18 years and six months in prison after being convicted of beating his girlfriend with a full 40-ounce beer bottle. Once paroled, he started dropping in on state legislators. He haunted the Capitol in Austin, telling his story to anyone who would listen.
“The first thing I remember thinking is, ‘How the hell did he get in here?’ ” recalled state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. Staffers for Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, and Rep. Carl Sherman, a DeSoto Democrat, confirmed their bosses also heard Davis’ story.
“I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat,” Davis said. “I’ll walk with all of them.”
Rep. Matt Schaefer, a Tyler Republican, listened cautiously when Davis first stopped by. “In a former life I did some criminal defense work,” he said. “So I come with a healthy skepticism of what anyone says in the criminal justice system.”
“I thought he just wanted to be listened to,” he added. “But then he’s showing up at the office all the time. It reminded me of the Bible story of the widow in front of the judge” — a parable Jesus told about a woman whose constant petitions for justice eventually prevailed.
In time, Schaefer, too, became convinced the state owed Davis his money.
‘Hard to win’
The federal court system receives tens of thousands of filings every year from aggrieved prisoners representing themselves. But federal procedure and civil rights law create a challenging legal maze.
“Civil rights law is very difficult to begin with, so it is hard to win no matter how talented you are,” said Jeff Edwards, an Austin attorney who has won civil rights cases against the Texas prison system.
Almost always the suits are dismissed as deficient, added H. Daniel Butler, an Iowa State University sociology professor who has studied civil rights lawsuits filed by Texas prisoners. In a recent paper, he found only 7
percent of the complaints resulted in what might be called a “win.”
To have a prisoner mostly represent himself and prevail, Butler added, “is extraordinary.”
Filed in January 2007, Davis’ original petition is a handwritten account of his prison attack. Suspecting that a guard under his command named Michael McDuffie was smuggling contraband, a lieutenant had lied to McDuffie in an effort to elicit a confession, saying Davis already had snitched on him.
Furious, McDuffie paid an inmate gang to attack Davis in retaliation, Davis wrote. When Davis complained, prison officials didn’t follow up on his grievances.
In her Report and Recommendations, Magistrate Judge Judith Guthrie noted both the lieutenant and McDuffie denied their alleged roles in the incident and that Davis’ injuries weren’t severe. She cited cases saying the prison system was not liable for every injury an inmate suffered at the hands of another inmate. Several weeks later, a judge dismissed his case on summary judgment.
Writing his own briefs, Davis appealed to the New Orleansbased 5th Circuit. In April 2009, a panel concluded Davis actually might have a case.
While “the district court found no … evidence supporting Davis’ allegation that McDuffie ordered the hit on Davis or knew of an impending hit on Davis,” they wrote, the “finding ignores interoffice communications between prison officials indicating that several informants asserted that Officer McDuffie paid the Mandingo Warriors 30 packs of Bugler Tobacco to assault Davis.”
“If McDuffie paid inmates to assault Davis,” the judges added, “this obviously would rise to a level of deliberate indifference beyond that protected by qualified immunity” — the legal shield insulating government agents from civil lawsuits for most actions they take while performing their on-the-job duties.
‘The best witnesses’
For the first time, Davis got a court-appointed lawyer to help him. A Lufkin attorney since the mid-1970s, Roger Neil Moss said he has worked with plenty of state prisoners.
“Daryl knew the facts of his case better than anyone I’ve represented,” he recalled. “He had boxes full of materials and I could say, ‘Give me that letter from so-and-so,’ and he’d reach over and snatch it right out.”
When Davis said he wanted the Mandingo Warriors to testify, Moss objected: “Those guys have bad reputations. I told Daryl, ‘They are not likely to be believed.’ ”
But during the three-day trial in April 2010, James Grant, serving a 75-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault, and Troy Sanders, convicted of capital murder, were calm, articulate and precise in their descriptions of prison life, Moss recalled — “the best witnesses.”
Sanders explained why the Hispanic gang contacted by McDuffie to attack Davis had to contract out the job to the Warriors, a Black organization. “The way penitentiary politics works,” he testified, “is that a Mexican, or group of Mexicans, jumping on a Black man, for those who are not in the know of what’s going on, it’s automatically going to be construed as something racial.”
Grant, who identified himself as the Mandingo Warriors’ official liaison to the prison’s Gang Intelligence Unit, described how the group had warned officials that Davis might be attacked, hoping they could get him moved off the unit without bloodshed. But administrators didn’t act.
“Did you see the actual attack?” Moss asked.
“Yes, sir,” Grant replied. “I participated in it.”
After deliberating three hours, the jury sided with Davis, voting to award him $25,000.
Collecting it was another matter.
Knocking on doors
Following the trial, Davis said state attorneys tried to strike a quick deal for $7,000. “They must have thought I’d take it because I was just an inmate,” he said. “But I said I’d rather have nothing.”
Back in his cell, he fired off a flurry of filings. When he argued the state should cover the bill, government lawyers said the prison system was not legally responsible for McDuffie’s actions. When he asked to garnish McDuffie’s wages, a judge rejected the idea, noting Davis hadn’t even provided a good address for the guard. McDuffie could not be reached for comment for this story.
In response to a growing number of inmate lawsuits, in 1996 the federal court system required prisoners to pay filing fees out of their trust accounts. When he ran out of money, “I just stopped filing,” Davis said.
He was released five years after his trial victory and returned to Tyler, where he started several charities to help schoolchildren. He also runs a car-detailing shop with a friend.
In 2015, Davis found a Georgetown attorney to help him collect. “The state should have paid him, and it should have been a lot more,” said Chad Van Cleave. “But they just told me, ‘We’re not liable and we don’t have any intention of paying the check.’ ”
He discovered the likelihood of collecting from McDuffie wasn’t much better. “The best I could tell he had a worthless trailer on property that didn’t belong to him and a rundown bass boat,” Van Cleave said.
So Davis started knocking on politicians’ doors.
‘Moral and legal obligation’
Schaefer said when Davis first approached him three years ago, “I thought, ‘Why should I spend my time on this case?’ ” But the fact Texas had offered a settlement suggested “people knew the state had screwed up,” he said. “Without a doubt, it had a moral and ethical obligation.”
“We worked it and worked it,” Schaefer said. But even with a legislator in his corner, the wheels turned slowly. In addition to the prison agency, the governor’s office and attorney general had to sign off.
Davis approached other lawmakers, as well. Neither Hughes nor Sherman was available for an interview, though both listened and helped, Davis said.
Whitmire, the longest-serving active senator and the influential chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said he made inquiries after hearing Davis out. “I asked (TDCJ Executive Director) Bryan Collier to take another look,” he said. “I thought he was entitled to his money. But it wasn’t just the money, but the principle of the thing.”
Two months ago, Schaefer’s office asked Davis to stop by. For the beating orchestrated by a State of Texas employee and his 16 years of dogged pursuit, Davis, now 58, was presented with a check for $27,669.86 — the jury award plus interest.
It wasn’t a seismic event in the world of prisoner jurisprudence; no systemic wrongs were righted. And in a state that has paid millions of dollars to prisoners who spent years — sometimes decades — locked up for crimes they never committed, the settlement of Davis’ debt made only the faintest of ripples.
But it did mark the end of one former prisoner’s journey to be seen. “No matter how many doors shut in your face, you need to fight,” Davis said. “You cannot be victorious if you give up.”