ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A jury has awarded $50,000 to a northern Virginia landlord who was shot three times with a stun gun when sheriff's deputies wrongly arrested him following a tenant's complaint.
Matthew Souter, 57, of The Plains, Virginia, was arrested at his home in November 2018 after a tenant in his 19th-century farmhouse claimed he had violated a protective order she had obtained a day earlier.
Before the trial began Tuesday in federal court, a judge ruled that the three Fauquier County sheriff's deputies who arrested Souter violated his constitutional rights.
The tenant claimed Souter violated the protective order by shutting off her utilities, which Souter denied. But even if he had cut off the power, Judge T.S. Ellis III said the plain language of the protective order merely barred Souter from committing acts of violence against the tenant, and shutting off the utilities would not qualify as a violation.
As a result, this week’s jury trial focused solely on the question of what damages, if any, should be awarded to Souter.
The jury decided late Thursday to award a total of $50,000 in compensatory damages, and no punitive damages.
The officers had argued that they should be held harmless; they noted that it was a magistrate who actually issued the arrest warrant, albeit at the request of one of the deputies. And they said they were entitled to qualified immunity, which protects law enforcement officers from a wide swath of legal liability.
Ellis, though, said that “qualified immunity is not for blunders,” and ruled as a matter of law that the deputies violated Souter's rights.
“If you have a lot of power, you've got to be carful how you exercise that power," Ellis told the lawyers at the trial's outset, outside the jury's presence. “It was a mistake a law...
