April 15, 2008
Court upholds female guard’s harassment award
A federal appeals court has upheld $600,000 in damages to a state prison guard who said she was fired after complaining that she was being harassed by naked male inmates.
The complaints by Deanna Freitag led to an investigation by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's inspector general, who found in 2000 that maximum-security inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison had regularly subjected female guards to "lewd exhibitionism and exhibitionist masturbation" and that the warden and other officials were doing little to stop it.
Freitag, who had worked at the prison in Del Norte County since 1996, was fired by Pelican Bay officials shortly before those findings were issued. Her bosses accused her of fabricating incidents in the reports she had been filing since September 1998…
LINK - SFGate.com (The San Francisco Chronicle)
