$725G in jail suit

City must pay for injuries from beating

THE CITY WILL pay $725,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a former city jails inmate who suffered a dislocated hip and broken bones during a 2010 beating by correction officers.

Michael Turner, now 41, was taken to Rikers Island in 2010 after cops arrested him for violating parole on a old conviction by not reporting to his parole officer.

He wound up at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers on Sept. 20, 2010. He was there for less than two hours, when guards began searching cells.

During the search, guards found toothache medication in his cell — which is contraband unless previously authorized.

Rather than leaving him in his cell and confirming his insistence that the pills were approved, three officers and a captain handcuffed him and pulled him out. They noticed he was wearing sneakers, and wrongly assumed they were not authorized.

They ignored his protests that he had approved sneakers and knocked him off his feet and jumped on top of him — dislocating his hip and breaking his femur.

“Basically, I was held by both arms by one officer on each arm, and one officer had my leg, my right leg, and I was slammed to the ground,” Turner said in his deposition. “Two of them fell on top of me. I laid on the floor screaming. I felt a bad pain in my leg.”

They dragged him to the infirmary and bloodied his wrists, which were still handcuffed. Despite his pleas and the pain, Correction Department officials did not take him to a hospital for nearly 11 hours.

Instead, they tried to get him to stay in the clinic.

“They kept telling me I just had a sprain,” he said.

Doctors specifically noted in their records he was assaulted by correction officers.

He had surgery in Bellevue Hospital and remained there for a month.

“The whole thing was unnecessary,” Turner’s lawyer Michael Cervini said. “There was no reason to take him out of his cell. His life was significantly affected by this. It was a horrific injury.”

Cervini said the Correction Department actually fined Turner $25 for disorderly conduct in the incident. No officers faced discipline for injuring him.

Turner finished his one-year stint behind bars and moved to Pennsylvania. Part of the settlement will go toward more medical care, he said.

“I got pain when down,” he said.

Turner added: “I want the world to know what happens in there. I’m no angel, but I didn’t go in there thinking I was going to have a broken hip. I had no idea this would happen to me. This is still with me.”

A spokesman for the city Law Department said, “The settlement is in the best interest of the city.” I bend