Illinois Prison's Plan To Use Female Inmate As 'Rape Bait' For Predatory Counselor Did Not Go Well
And the officials involved will not be getting their qualified immunity.
Just over two years ago, a jury awarded Andrea Nielsen, a former inmate at Illinois's Logan Correctional Center, $19.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages against the prison counselor who sexually assaulted her and the two dimwit prison officials whose harebrained scheme to “catch him in the act” resulted in her getting sexually assaulted at least one more time. The jury found, quite easily, that Nielsen’s Eighth Amendment rights to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment were violated by all three.
Naturally, the two officials, prison investigator Todd Sexton and Warden Margaret Burke, filed an appeal immediately. Lawyers for the dynamic duo argued that they were protected by qualified immunity (which allows cops and those in similar positions to do pretty much anything they want without consequence), that there was insufficient evidence for a new trial, and that the amount of damages awarded by the jury would have been less had they heard the “evidence” that led the two to believe the assaults could have been consensual. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit’s three-judge panel denied the first two motions, but awarded them a new trial on damages only.
This all started in December of 2016 when Nielsen’s roommate — referred to only as “Hicks” in court proceedings — reported to Sexton that Nielsen was being repeatedly sexually assaulted by prison counselor Richard MacLeod.
According to Sexton’s log of the interview, Hicks told him that Nielsen told her that for the past “couple months, maybe more,” MacLeod had been having unprotected vaginal and oral sex with her when she would go to the vocational building to make her court-ordered phone calls to her daughter. Hicks said that MacLeod had refused to use condoms despite Nielsen telling him he “needed” to do so, claiming that smuggling them into the prison would be “too risky.” Nielsen had gone the day before (a Wednesday) in the afternoon, Hicks said, although she did not know what occurred then. MacLeod also sometimes summoned Nielsen on Saturdays to “help him out,” Hicks reported, although she did not know what time of day that typically occurred.
MacLeod’s office was reportedly in “a known blind spot” away from security cameras, which seems like a thing there should not be in a prison.
Nielsen would later share in court that MacLeod also threatened her with another year of prison and solitary confinement should she not submit to him. He also told her that he was BFFs with Sexton and that Sexton would “protect him and let him know if anybody was on his trail.” So when Sexton initially approached her two weeks after Hicks’s report and asked her if there were “any problems with any staff members or any issues you want to talk to me about,” it’s hardly surprising that she said there were not.
The official protocol was to separate Nielsen from MacLeod pending an investigation, a practice otherwise known as “common fucking sense.” But rather than do that, rather than put Nielsen’s safety first, Sexton and Burke “formulated an outrageous plan to use her as unwitting 'bait' to try to catch MacLeod in the act.”
The plan — which Nielsen was not in on or made aware of — “was for Sexton to stay late a few times, crawl around in the ceiling above the room MacLeod used to sexually assault Nielsen, and wait to jump down and intervene.”
As Judge David Hamilton, an Obama appointee, noted in his opinion, the plan was an abject failure and a terrible idea to begin with.
The plan, of course, relied on MacLeod attempting to sexually assault Nielsen again, and doing so on Sexton’s schedule. Sexton and Burke knew that MacLeod had “continuing and ongoing access” to Nielsen, could “easily” assault her again, and could do so whenever he wanted, practically 24/7. Either Sexton or Burke could have acted on their own authority to prevent further assaults by separating Nielsen and MacLeod. They chose not to, apparently because it would have foiled their plan to use her as “bait.”
Sexton soon gave up on his very stupid plan, and Nielsen was sexually assaulted again in February of 2017.
The basis of the new trial is that Sexton was prohibited from sharing with the original jury his theory that the sexual assault may have been consensual, as Nielsen’s roommate also told him that once, when they were showering, Nielsen said “I have to get freshened up for my man.” Lawyers for Sexton and Burke argued that, had this “evidence” not been excluded at trial, the jury may have awarded Nielsen less money.
Aside from the fact that a statement like that could just as well be gallows humor, there is no such thing as consensual sex between an inmate at a prison and an official at that prison. This is especially true when that official is in charge of things like whether or not an inmate gets to talk to her child. That is rape. It is, for the record, also rape when a woman asks a man to wear a condom and he refuses and penetrates her anyway. These two facts alone should have made it very clear to Sexton that this was not some beautiful but illicit romance. If this was something he was too stupid to understand, he should have chosen a different career path that did not require this level of discernment.
According to Nielsen, the prison was rampant with sexual assault, a problem officials were largely apathetic about. As Judge Hamilton explained, “the data agree with her.”
A 2016 investigation found that
During the assessment, some staff expressed contempt for the women and gender-responsive, evidence-based, and trauma-informed approaches by stating that they believe the women are worthless, crazy, talk too much, and will never be anything more than a convict. In some instances, they refer to the women inmates as “animals”.
An expert witness on Nielsen’s behalf stated that this report revealed that the “prevailing attitude” among prison officials was that “prisoners lie … if their mouth is moving.” This is, of course, a very convenient “prevailing attitude” for people who do not want to do jack shit about women being repeatedly raped and otherwise sexually assaulted to hold.
This attitude also explains why Sexton later determined that Hicks was not credible “because he was told she was giving information to gain a transfer to another housing unit.”
MacLeod’s sexual abuse of Nielsen ended, but only because she was able to convince another counselor to let her take phone calls in their office instead. Sexton didn’t continue investigating after his initial “plan” fell through, until later in 2017 when a correctional officer told him that MacLeod had been sexually harassing her.
The officer said that at one point MacLeod told her, “I am a stalker. I will find out where you live. I may already know.” That same day, Sexton spoke to Nielsen again, this time conducting a structured interview and specifically using MacLeod’s name. As soon as he did so, Sexton testified, he could tell from Nielsen’s body language that something had been going on. She soon told him about the abuse. Sexton had her belongings packed up and later that day drove Nielsen from Logan to another prison. A few days later, he emailed a former colleague about Nielsen: “Yeah I will have to tell you about the inmate I just took to Decatur Friday dealing with a certain counselor haha it’s a good one.”
“Haha, it’s a good one.”
I’m going to note here that even the original jury did not find that Sexton and Burke were liable for the assault on the grounds that they were indifferent to the culture of rampant sexual assault at the prison, but “Haha, it’s a good one” certainly suggests that this just may have been the case.
Even if Sexton believed that the two could have been having a fabulous whirlwind romance and that Nielsen might have acted to “protect” her lover from any investigation (as he claimed), he still had an obligation to protect her from his abuse. Because even if she were madly in love with him, that is still what it was. The option existed to remove her from the situation and he did not bother to do so. He did not do his job, and as a result, Andrea Nielsen was raped, again.
If anything, he should be required to pay even more in damages for the sheer stupidity of it all.
I don’t know who Todd Sexton or Margaret Burke were before all of this occurred. They may have been complete assholes, they may have been decent people. However, this should make clear that it’s not only the inmates who frequently go into prison and come out worse. I suppose it’s possible that a jury may knock down the price tag a little bit for them, but they still have to live with themselves and what they did to Andrea Nielsen for the rest of their lives. They have to live with who they are and what they allowed to happen not just to Nielsen, but likely to the hundreds of other women who came through the doors of Logan Correctional Center to find themselves in a similar situation.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Who in the hell would come up with such an effed-up scheme as this one? Talk about fucking stupidity--we won't find anything worse than this.
This is obscene.