IBCO Officer’s 20-Day Suspension Reversed
November 18, 2008
The IBCO successfully reversed an officer’s 20-day suspension for alleged retaliation against an inmate after the union proved the report at the center of the allegations didn’t exist.
In October 2004, an inmate at the Pondville Correctional Institute in Norfolk, Massachusetts was discovered out of place in the warehouse section of the facility. In front of about 20 other inmates, he refused repeated orders to return to his block. Correctional Program Officer II Donald Stewart, an 18-year veteran in the Mass. Department of Correction, was functioning as shift commander during the incident. Pondville was short-staffed that day, with only three officers for nearly 200 inmates. Concerned that the situation might become explosive, Stewart removed the inmate from the warehouse to a holding cell and requested permission to move him to maximum security. The director of security, however, denied Stewart’s request.
Four months after the incident, the inmate wrote a letter to the Pondville superintendent, charging that Stewart had retaliated against him by filing a disciplinary report on the inmate the day after the incident. The inmate said that he continued to experience harassment at the hands of Pondville officers.
In May 2005, the DOC opened an investigation into the incident and its alleged aftermath. An investigator interviewed both Stewart and the inmate. At a commissioners’ hearing in January 2006, the DOC concluded that Stewart had retaliated against the inmate, ruling that it was “more likely than not” that Stewart had harassed and retaliated against the inmate. The report called the inmate a “credible inmate who was well-educated.” The DOC suspended Stewart for 20 days without pay and transferred him involuntarily to another facility. The IBCO filed a grievance.
Throughout the grievance process, IBCO Local R1-75 President Robert Cutting and IBCO Attorney Julia Fahey argued that the DOC’s investigation was flawed and inaccurate, without evident proof of misconduct. The matter was finally sent to arbitration.
At arbitration, IBCO Attorney Michael Manning demonstrated that the alleged disciplinary report Stewart wrote against the inmate the day after the October 2004 incident was never written and did not exist. He introduced evidence that the inmate in question has a history of incurring disciplinary reports during his incarceration, and that the DOC relied on hearsay information from the inmate in deciding Stewart’s guilt. The arbitrator agreed with Manning and ordered Stewart’s 20-day suspension reversed. The DOC has since reversed Officer Stewart’s suspension and has initiated talks with the IBCO to settle the appeal of another officer’s suspension connected to other statements from the same inmate.
President Cutting praised attorneys Fahey and Manning after the arbitration win. “We knew from the beginning of the investigation that the Department did not have just cause to discipline our officers. We are greatly disappointed in the Departments’ recent tendency to accept inmate complaints against staff without full evaluation of the information and consideration of the source of the complaints. A sincere thank you to IBCO for another job well done!”