A woman who said she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a counselor while incarcerated at a downstate prison and that authorities failed to properly act on her accusations was awarded more than $19 million by a federal jury late last week.

The woman’s 2018 federal lawsuit against Logan Correctional Center personnel said the assaults occurred at a time when there were dozens of allegations of sexual assault or harassment by Illinois Department of Corrections employees against people who were incarcerated.

The jury awarded the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, $8 million in compensatory damages and more than $11 million in punitive damages. Defendants included Richard Macleod, who was accused of sexually assaulting the plaintiff while he was a counselor at Logan, Todd Sexton, an internal affairs investigator at the prison when the allegations surfaced, and Margaret Burke, Logan’s warden at the time of the alleged acts.

“What I’m hoping is that a number like this will get somebody’s attention at the Department of Corrections to finally grapple with this problem, which has been going on for decades,” said Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center, which helped represent the woman.

“The Department of Corrections desperately needs independent oversight and, you know, as I’ve said, somebody at Logan should have been standing up and screaming it from the rooftops saying that this is going on and you have to stop, or we just can’t do business as usual,” Mills said.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office, which represented many of the defendants in the case, had no comment. The Illinois Department of Corrections also declined to comment.

The woman alleged the assaults started in 2016 when she was assigned to a housing unit where Macleod was her counselor. Macleod subsequently let her use the phone in his office so she could call her daughter, and then sexually assaulted her during those meetings, according to court documents.

“At all times Macleod knew how important (the woman’s) phone calls with her daughter were to her and he knew that (the woman) would need to go through him in order to have the calls,” the lawsuit stated.

The woman was transferred to another housing unit “but Macleod made a special effort to remain her counselor,” the lawsuit stated. The woman did not report Macleod’s misconduct for fear of retribution.

Macleod told the woman that he had a friend in the prison system, Sexton, who advised him on avoiding punishment, according to the lawsuit.

“(The woman) understood this to mean that Macleod would not be held accountable for his actions even if she did report his misconduct,” the lawsuit stated.

Macleod’s abuse of the woman continued through at least May 2017, before she was assigned a new counselor, according to the lawsuit.

The woman was subsequently transferred to Decatur Correctional Center. The prison was farther from some family members and, in court documents, she described the transfer as an act of retaliation.

The suit alleged that prison personnel at Logan knew as early as February 2017 that Macleod “was in fact engaging in this pattern of abuse, knew of a substantial likelihood that defendant Macleod was sexually abusing prisoners at Logan, and/or failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it from continuing.”

According to court documents, 54 incidents of staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct at Logan were reported in 2016, according to the lawsuit.

The Illinois State Police investigated the allegations against Macleod, and one investigator later testified that she suspected Macleod abused other inmates as well as the plaintiff, according to court documents.

In the summer of 2017, Logan’s assistant warden, Angel Wilson, recommended that Macleod be “locked out” of working at the prison, according to court documents. But Macleod stayed at Logan for 13 months, and was paid an annual salary of more than $97,500 as of 2019, according to court documents.

Macleod resigned from IDOC in July 2021 and was briefly employed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services in 2022 before being “discharged by the department,” according to a DCFS spokeswoman who said she could not provide more details on his firing.

Macleod never showed up for hearings or otherwise engaged in the case over five years, according to Nicole Schult, legal director of the Uptown People’s Law Center. A Springfield judge issued a default judgment against him, allowing the assaults to be admissible as fact in court, according to Schult and court transcripts.

The state police investigated the alleged assaults against Jane Doe and other Logan inmates and recommended charges against Macleod, but the attorney general’s office declined to prosecute, according to Christina Sharkey, a former partner at Kirkland & Ellis who worked on the plaintiff’s behalf. Among other issues, DNA evidence was never collected.

Macleod could not be reached for comment.

Sexton still works at the Department of Corrections, a spokesperson confirmed.

The state’s prison system faces issues on a number of fronts. On Tuesday, the state’s auditor general issued a report covering a two-year period ending in June 2022 that laid out several deficiencies at IDOC, including failing to adequately train some of its employees.

IDOC officials told the auditor general they have made an effort to better train its employees, which was more difficult to do in the last few years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and pay down the liabilities owed by the commissary funds.

IDOC has been under a federally mandated consent decree to overhaul its health care system since 2019, Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s first year in office. The decree stemmed from a 2010 lawsuit filed by prisoners who alleged systemic problems that led to serious disease and even death for prisoners

Last year, a federal monitor tasked with overseeing reforms within IDOC issued a report saying the prison system failed to provide adequate health care for the roughly 29,000 people who are incarcerated in the system.

Shortcomings outlined in the report ranged from the mistreatment of elderly inmates to a severe shortage of doctors and nurses, as well as poor record-keeping.

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

iarougheti@chicagotribune.com

Originally Published: Sep 27, 2023 at 6:57 pm