By Justin Fenton
The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE — Maryland’s highest court has affirmed an $18.5 million jury verdict in the 2005 killing of an man by a fellow inmate aboard a prison bus.
Cary J. Hansel, an attorney for the victim’s family, said the initial jury award against the state has swelled to more than $25 million due to interest accrued since the 2011 verdict during appeals.
A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office declined to comment Friday.
The jurors found the state and four correctional officers were negligent in the death of Philip E. Parker Jr., who was killed by inmate Kevin G. Johns Jr. while he was being taken from a court hearing in Hagerstown to a prison in Baltimore.
Johns was in prison for killing his uncle and killed a 16-year-old cellmate. After being sentenced for the second killing, he remarked that “the killing has just begun.” On Feb. 2, 2005, Johns choked Parker and cut his neck with a razor blade while aboard a bus, with corrections officer Larry Cooper sitting seven feet away, according to court records.
Johns died of an apparent suicide in his cell at Supermax in 2009.
The opinion by the Maryland Court of Appeals condemned civil rights violations committed by corrections officers. “The circumstances demonstrate that Parker’s murder was accomplished in the face of Cooper’s total disregard for his duty as a correctional officer and indifference to the consequences to Parker,” the court held.
Hansel said the ruling would pave the way to make civil rights violations easier to prosecute in civil court because for the first time the Court of Appeals had recognized “gross negligence” as an exception to immunity for public officials.