By Tom Eldred,
Delaware State News
WILMINGTON - Lawyers for a prison counselor who was held hostage and raped last year at the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna filed an 80-page court document Thursday, asserting why a lawsuit she filed should go forward.
The document is in response to claims by the state that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the counselor, Cassandra Arnold, knew she would be working in a dangerous environment when she was hired, was paid for hazardous duty and voluntarily accepted known risks from inmates.
Her lawsuit was filed Oct. 12 in U.S. District Court after the state rejected a $3.9 million settlement offer. It names Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, the Department of Correction, Correction Commissioner Stanley W. Taylor and 11 others as defendants.
Ms. Arnold, 27, was taken hostage and raped July 12 by Scott A. Miller, a serial rapist serving 699 years for multiple assaults against women.
The incident occurred after Miller somehow moved unnoticed into a nonsecure administrative hallway and hid in a bathroom after attending Ms. Arnold's stress management class with other prisoners.
As Ms. Arnold passed the bathroom, Miller brandished a homemade knife and grabbed her. Holding the knife to her throat, he pulled her into an office, barricaded the door with furniture, and kept rescuers at bay for nearly seven hours before he was shot and killed by a correctional officer.
Before he was shot, Miller tied Ms. Arnold up with contraband plastic wrap, raped her, and then tried to kill her with his knife.
The lawsuit claims Gov. Minner, Mr. Taylor and the other defendants are legally responsible for damages because their actions led to a "state-created danger" that caused the incident.
Attorneys for the state said the court should throw out the lawsuit because the state-created danger theory does not apply to law enforcement officers and others working in prisons.
They said there has never been a case in any court in the nation where a governor has been found liable for an inmate attacking a correctional worker.
In Thursday's court filing, attorneys Jeffrey K. Martin and Herbert G. Feuerhake said Ms. Arnold was deprived of her "substantive due process right to liberty" because the defendants created "shockingly unsafe conditions of employment" at DCC.
They said lack of training and grossly inadequate security procedures allowed the "sort of grisly, macabre, and altogether appalling psychodrama" where "a sick and violent individual such as inmate Scott Miller is not merely angry and desperate but also provided with the freedom to act on his darker urges."
They said the state, in failing to properly fund and staff DCC, trampled on the rights of Ms. Arnold in a "tyrannical" fashion.
"Do the defendants in this case have the right, within our federal governmental system, to operate the DOC in a conscience-shocking manner that results in violations of the federal constitutional rights of its employee, Cassie Arnold, with no fear that they might have to answer in the courts?" Mr. Martin and Mr. Feuerhake asked.
"Inmate Scott Miller was a convicted rapist. The purpose of maintaining a secure facility with locked doors, alert guards, and appropriate safeguards, is to prevent someone like Scott Miller from perpetuating mayhem. ... The harm to Cassie Arnold was a foreseeable consequence of the defendants' shocking conduct."
A majority of Thursday's court filing is devoted to cases argued in federal court and the U.S. Supreme Court relative to constitutional rights of employees in the workplace.
While acknowledging those rights may be limited - because a worker always has the option of quitting - the document insists there is a higher standard.
"What the case law makes clear is that the state can indeed get away with providing an unsafe workplace indefinitely, as long as the chickens, so to speak, do not come home to roost," the brief says.
"But if the chickens do come home to roost - which is to say, if shocking conditions lead to injury - then the courts can (and must) step in to redress a constitutional deprivation of liberty."
Finally, Mr. Martin and Mr. Feuerhake argued the lawsuit must advance to trial because there are too many unanswered questions leading to Ms. Arnold's ordeal in the nonsecure portion of the prison.
"Why was this animal, the predatory and evil Scott Miller, unleashed and primed for terror in the administrative corridor?" they asked.
"Look into Miller's eyes close up, not as Cassie Arnold did after the attack, but before, as Miller hovered behind the door in that restroom, darkness in his heart.
"How is it that this threat came into being? It is for a jury to tell the world why this thing happened."
Senior writer Tom Eldred can be reached at 741-8212 or teldred@newszap.com.
Reprinted with permission from newszap.com
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