Nearly Twenty Years Suing Oklahoma Counties Over What Happens Inside Their Jails

Some people have the power to ruin your life and expect to get away with it. County sheriffs and jailers in Oklahoma have that power over everyone booked into their facilities, and for nearly twenty years I have been suing them when they abuse it.

This is what that work has looked like, county by county.

Custer County, 2007: the first one

The first civil rights case I ever handled was against Custer County. Fourteen women who had been held in that jail sued Sheriff Mike Burgess and the county over what he did to them and what the office let him do.

Burgess resigned in 2008 facing thirty-five felony counts. He was convicted on thirteen of them, including second-degree rape, forcible oral sodomy, sexual battery, kidnapping and bribery, and sentenced to seventy-nine years. The civil case settled for ten million dollars. Greg Williams of Tulsa was lead counsel; I was one of the attorneys of record.

A sheriff went to prison for the rest of his life, and the county that employed him had to answer for it in federal court. That is the outcome. It took four years.

Delaware County: fifteen more women

Two years later the same pattern surfaced in Delaware County. Fifteen former female detainees alleged they were raped and assaulted by the jail administrator and a deputy.

The county's insurance policy capped out at one million dollars. The settlement was thirteen and a half million. The sheriff resigned two days after the board voted to pay it. I was again one of the attorneys of record.

Two counties, twenty-nine women, and two sets of officials who ran their jails as though no one would ever check.

Cherokee County: Bosh

In May 2011 jailers at the Cherokee County Detention Center attacked Daniel Bosh while he stood at the booking desk with his hands cuffed behind his back. The county fought that case for five years before it settled.

What came out of it was Bosh v. Cherokee County Governmental Building Authority, 2013 OK 9, in which the Oklahoma Supreme Court held that the state constitution gives people a right to sue for excessive force that the Governmental Tort Claims Act immunities do not reach. For about a year, people beaten by jailers had a remedy they had never had. Then the Legislature took it away.

I wrote separately about what that claim was and what happened to it: What Is a Bosh Claim, and Why Can't You Bring One Anymore?.

Creek County and Muskogee County

In Creek County I represented the mother of a man who died following a 2017 arrest. That case resolved for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.

In Muskogee County I represented the family of a man who died in custody, in a case that went to the Tenth Circuit and came back with summary judgment reversed in part.

McCurtain County

The McCurtain County cases are current work, and I write about them separately as they move. One former jailer has pled guilty to conspiracy in an inmate attack. The Tenth Circuit recently vacated the judgment that had ended the federal case over Bobby Barrick's death and sent it back.

For the full picture of those three cases, read After Kill. Bury. Print.: The McCurtain County Jail Cases.

What the pattern is

Six counties. Different sheriffs, different decades, the same structure: a facility with no meaningful outside scrutiny, staff who understood that, and an office that treated complaints as something to be managed rather than investigated.

None of these counties fixed anything on its own. Every change came because somebody filed suit and stayed with it for years. That is slow, and it is the only mechanism that has ever worked.

If someone in your family was hurt or died in an Oklahoma county jail, there is a practical guide here: Hurt or Killed in an Oklahoma County Jail: What Families Should Know.

Garrett Law, Tulsa. (918) 221-6190.

Related: Oklahoma civil rights attorney. To talk about your own situation, request a free consultation.

The results described here reflect the specific facts and law of individual cases and do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future matter. In the Custer County and Delaware County matters I served as one of several attorneys of record, not as lead counsel. This page is attorney advertising. Nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship or constitutes legal advice.