After four days, Demetrius Goshen just wanted to take a shower. But, when he got the attention of corrections officers, it came with a beating, part of a wave of abuse against more than 150 other incarcerated individuals that sparked a lawsuit brought by Hogan Lovells and led to a $6.75 million settlement and a slew of reforms.

In early 2020, following an assault on several guards by a small number of people incarcerated at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts, prison officials engaged in what a 2022 lawsuit would describe as "brutal and calculated collective revenge."

About a month after the initial incident, on Feb. 6, the violence reached Goshen. He said he and other prisoners had blocked the windows of their cells in a bid to prompt someone to come to their unit. Instead, officials told their tactical teams to use force, the lawsuit alleged.

"They suited up," Goshen told Law360. "Every CO was on a rampage. They had a crazy, wild look in their eyes."

Goshen said he heard corrections officers as they went cell to cell, gassing and beating people in his unit. Eventually, they reached his cell, cracking the door open just enough to spray chemical agents inside without any provocation, he said.

"They emptied the whole can on me," he said. "At that point, I couldn't see or breathe or anything. They were just unleashing havoc on me."

Officers slammed Goshen against the wall with a shield before tackling him and kicking him in the ribs and genitals, the complaint states, adding that the abuse continued after he was handcuffed. His arms were yanked through the wicket of a visiting booth door and Goshen said he heard one of the officers tell his subordinates to "pull as hard as you can" and "break his wrists."

By the time Prisoners' Legal Services of Massachusetts began to investigate, around 160 incarcerated people at Souza-Baranowski had been subjected to physical and verbal abuse, the suit alleged.

"We realized after not very long that this was a massive project, both the investigation and the contemplated litigation," said David Rini, a senior attorney at PLS. "So we reached out to Hogan Lovells around mid-2020, and we worked together for the next five years."

A Call to Legal Action

Kayla Ghantous did not expect this suit, led by plaintiffs Dwayne Diggs, Goshen and others, to be the first thing handed to her on her very first day as a lawyer. The Hogan Lovells associate was part of the team at the BigLaw firm that handled the suit after it was filed in January 2022, about two years after the prison was locked down.

"We dove right in," Ghantous said. "It was a lot of factual work."

Over more than three years of discovery, she and her fellow attorneys took nearly 20 depositions as they waded through the significant number of people involved in the series of incidents.

Ghantous noted that, with 150 class members and 18 defendants, the "sheer volume" of discovery material was a challenge. She said the Hogan Lovells team reviewed roughly 99,000 pages of documents and analyzed "many, many hours" of video from the prison.

"It was really prisonwide, what we call a 'retaliatory force campaign,'" Rini said. "So there was a massive amount of incarcerated individuals and other people involved, which generated a huge factual record."

Each incident — which the suit said included physical beatings, the use of dogs and racially charged verbal abuse — involved multiple officers, different types of force and multiple witnesses.

It was also a legally complex case, Rini noted, with a high standard of proof to not only hold individual officers responsible, but to also prove culpability for high-ranking officials up to the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction.

Hogan Lovells partner Anthony Fuller said the firm was fully behind the team's efforts, citing an initiative to advance racial justice established in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a police officer in 2020.

"We are usually defending class actions for our clients, so bringing one on the plaintiff's side was a new thing," Fuller said, adding that pro bono work is deeply embedded in the culture of the firm.

"As attorneys, we have a duty to commit ourselves to pro bono," he said. "It also gives young lawyers a chance to do things in court or in discovery that they wouldn't otherwise get to do. It's a win-win, as they say."

In this case, Fuller added, "all you have to do is think about a family member. If it was your family member incarcerated, would you want them treated like this? Everybody was able to get their minds around that."

A Meaningful Deal

The eventual settlement was approved in October by U.S. District Judge Margaret R. Guzman. In addition to providing nearly $7 million for the class members, it includes numerous reforms meant to prevent a similar incident from happening again.

"The settlement has a ton of policy reform," Ghantous said. "We are so happy the class members can get some money out of it, but this will also have a huge, lasting impact."

Among the provisions in the settlement are a requirement for dogs to be muzzled and prohibiting corrections officers from forcing incarcerated people to kneel for extended periods. The deal also requires the department to implement new diversity and implicit bias training for correctional officers, to provide enhanced training on de-escalation, and establish a hotline for prison staff to report misconduct and stronger requirements for reporting and investigating uses of force.

Deployment of the Special Operations Response Unit now requires approval from the Department of Correction commissioner. And, any time a SORU unit is deployed, a video team is also dispatched to record the response.

"That was a huge issue in the case," Rini said. "A lot of these use of force incidents were not recorded, which gives the officers license to commit misconduct knowing it's unlikely to be documented."

In addition to the work done by PLS and Hogan Lovells, Boston-based Hemenway & Barnes LLP worked with the families of six plaintiffs who died during the course of the litigation to ensure that they also received compensation from the settlement.

Hemenway & Barnes partner Joan Garrity Flynn said in a statement that the work was complex, involving administering six estates in five counties, and noted that all six estates lacked a valid will and presented "a very different fact pattern."

In a statement released this year after the settlement was agreed to, then-state Public Safety and Security Secretary Terrence Reidy said that the resolution "reflects the DOC's steadfast commitment to promoting the safety and security of everyone who lives and works within our state correctional facilities."

Goshen said he thinks the reforms in the settlement were well thought out, noting that the lawyers took significant time to figure out what they could change and what might be the most impactful.

"The most important part of jail should be safety," he said. "But, when it comes to officers, you have nothing, you have no protection. So that puts a little bit of a buffer on the protection of the inmate."

The money will help as well, Goshen said. He went to prison when he was 18 and has since been released, but at nearly 30, he contemplates a future with very little work or adult life experience.

"I could do anything, and this helps a lot, it goes a lot farther than what people think," Goshen said. "It's a crucial part for helping me get back on my feet."

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo and Nicole Bleier.

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