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Officials To Pay $100,000 In Sarasota Inmate's Injury

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By TODD RUGER of Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: January 22, 2008

Officials agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit from a former jail inmate whose back was broken after a confrontation with a corrections officer in 2003.

A former corrections officer, Matthew O'Kon, was acquitted on a charge he intentionally slammed Gerrese Daniels into a wall at the Sarasota County Jail.

Two jail nurses examined him and determined Daniels was "faking it" when talking about not being able to move his legs because his arms and legs moved without any response of pain and because he moved his legs when a sharp object was stuck in his foot, the lawsuit claims.

A jail nurse cleared the 22-year-old Daniels to continue in a prison transport van, though he had no feeling in much of his body, according to reports.

Upon arrival at the Central Florida Reception Center, state medical staff airlifted him to an Orlando hospital, where it was discovered that the fourth and fifth vertebrae in his back had been severed, the lawsuit claims.

Prison Health Services, the company the sheriff's office hired to provide inmate health care, is still in the lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial next month.

The sheriff's office did not renew Prison Health Services' contract last year.

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