Attorneys who successfully sued cities for shoddy police work and an advocate for battered women on Monday lauded Aurora’s decision to reach a $240,000 settlement with four victims of serial rapist Brent J. Brents, saying it was unlikely the case ever would have gone before a jury.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last summer that Jessica Gonzales had no right to sue Castle Rock’s police for not enforcing a restraining order against her husband mere hours before he killed her three daughters in 1999, advocates for battered women were fearful. They speculated the decision would lead to a shoddy policing in cases of violent crimes against women.
Arapahoe District Attorney Carol Chambers fueled that speculation when she commented recently that she didn’t anticipate large payouts to Brents’ victims because of the Castle Rock ruling, saying it meant police shouldn’t be held responsible for a third party’s actions.
The settlement “should be seen as some validation for the victims’ pain,” said Kristian Miccio, an advocate for victims of abuse and assistant professor at University of Denver’s law school. “Citizens of Aurora should be proud that their city stepped to the plate on this one and did what was the right thing.”
The settlement will stave off lawsuits that claimed the city should have had arrested Brents before his final rampage in January and February of 2005.
State law shields its civil servants from almost any negligent acts, say legal experts, who use an analogy that in Colorado police officers aren’t legally required to jump in and save a drowning woman.
“They would have had to show that the police did more than simply fail to protect them, and that they willfully and wantonly did something to make the situation more dangerous than it otherwise would have been,” said Bruce Jones, who represented the daughter of slain Columbine teacher Dave Sanders and won a $1.5 million lawsuit settlement from Jefferson County in 2002.
One of the victims who sued Aurora asked for $2.5 million.
But legal experts point out that Colorado’s Governmental Immunity Act caps damages at $600,000 for a group of plaintiffs in state court cases. And they maintain that regardless of cap, a judge likely would have thrown out the case.
“Colorado is the strictest of any state in the country when it comes to protecting its civil servants from claims of negligence – this is probably the worst state to be injured by the negligence of a state or a public agency,” said Timothy Rastello, a Boulder attorney who won two multimillion-dollar lawsuits in federal court against Denver police in 2001 and 2004.
“The Legislature ought to revise the law so that police officers are held to at least a reasonable standard of conduct,” he said, “because right now they have very little incentive to do anything different than what they did in the Brents case and Gonzales case.”
Staff writer Manny Gonzales can be reached at 303-820-1537 or mgonzales@denverpost.com.
