City agrees to settle lawsuit by woman cleared of charge

The city has agreed to pay $35,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a former school aide who was cleared of a charge she molested a 6-year-old child.

The Tampa City Council is scheduled to vote April 1 on whether to approve the settlement with Tamika Lane-Gardner, who was arrested in 2006 on a charge of felony sexual battery.

Lane-Gardner was later cleared of an accusation that she molested the girl in a bathroom at Walton Academy for the Performing Arts, a Central Tampa charter school where she was an assistant.

City Attorney Chip Fletcher didn't comment but provided The Tampa Tribune with a document showing the settlement amount.

Lane-Gardner's attorney, Christopher Scott Knopik, said the settlement is "probably the best thing" for everybody and would more than compensate his client for her legal fees.

"It allows everybody to put a very difficult circumstance behind" them, he said.

Knopik said the city did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement. Such admissions, he said, are "incredibly rare in virtually any kind of litigation."

He lauded his client: "My hat's off to her because in the face of very difficult law, which is difficult to penetrate for civil rights claimants, she had the courage to stand up, and she has, from my perspective, held the city of Tampa and the police accountable for what has happened."

He said Lane-Gardner, a 33-year-old mother of two, would seek to have the record of her arrest expunged from official records.

Lane-Gardner spent 10 days in jail - most of them in solitary confinement - before she was able to post bail after her arrest, her lawsuit states.

The Hillsborough County state attorney's office dropped the charge after Lane-Gardner passed a lie-detector test. Officials said there was no evidence to prove the charge and credibility problems with the alleged victim.

Lane-Gardner's criminal defense attorneys said the child's mother had previously made "a strikingly similar accusation of sexual impropriety against a woman at a day care facility to whom the mother owed money," the lawsuit states.

By the time the charge was dropped, Lane-Gardner had suffered "severe emotional damages" and was "ostracized" because of statements made to the media by then-Tampa police spokesman Larry McKinnon, the lawsuit states.

McKinnon and then-Police Chief Steven Hogue were initially named as defendants but later dismissed from the case.

The lawsuit quoted McKinnon as telling reporters, "There was a penetration of the child, and that's what determines the case of sexual battery as opposed to lewd and lascivious or inappropriate touching." But there was no evidence of any penetration.

McKinnon, who now works for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, said in an affidavit that he was answering a reporter's question about the differences between lewd and lascivious and sexual battery.

"I was not asserting that the plaintiff was guilty of penetrating the alleged victim," he said.