Baltimore City police have agreed to pay $24,000 to a 55-year-old man whose rough treatment while handcuffed was caught on tape.
Minutes after a city jury on Thursday began deliberating on Glenn Curry’s multimillion-dollar police brutality suit, Curry abruptly accepted the city’s settlement offer.
“It’s always good when the city admits that an officer did something wrong,” said Granville Templeton, Curry’s attorney. “This was never about money, but about accountability and making sure that police acknowledge the harm they caused my client.”
The settlement comes two years after The Examiner ran still shots from the video that appeared to show Curry being thrown to the ground and dragged across a sidewalk while handcuffed after being arrested. The video also showed the officer raising his arm and Curry’s baseball cap flying off.
During the four-day civil trial, attorneys for the city questioned Curry’s credibility, arguing he possessed a single pill of heroin at the time of his arrest, Templeton said. The city also claimed the officer did not strike Curry, but merely guided him to the ground after he resisted arrest, according to Templeton.
But Templeton said Curry, an apartment maintenance worker, did not possess any drugs — pointing out that prosecutors dropped all charges stemming from his arrest.
“They tried to retry him basically,” he said. “Suddenly they had a gel cap which they did not have at the time of his arrest, and the judge allowed them to show it to the jury.”
Police officials did not return calls for comment. The city solicitor’s office also did not immediately return calls.
The release of the videotape in 2006 prompted internal charges against the officer, who was cleared of any wrongdoing by a police trial board.
The city state’s attorney’s office of police misconduct also reviewed the videotape, but declined to press charges.
