LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – At 73 and with health issues and no criminal history, Betty Melloan was deemed a low risk by a judge after being charged with wanton endangerment. She was ordered to be released from jail on her own recognizance.
“Take those documents and you’re going to get out of jail,” former Jefferson District Judge Sean Delahanty told Melloan in her January 2018 arraignment, according to a video of the hearing.
But Melloan didn’t get out. She was left sleeping on the floor of Metro Corrections until the officer who had taken her to court the day before noticed her and, according to Melloan, asked, “Why in the world are you still here?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Melloan recalled in later testimony. “I was asking for my medication. People in the cell where I was (were) hollering out the window that I should have been released. I needed to talk to someone, but no one responded.”
Melloan is one of thousands of former inmates who are part of a lawsuit claiming they were improperly detained in the Louisville jail for several hours, days, weeks and even months after they were supposed to be released on bond, home incarceration or because they had served their sentence.
Metro Corrections officials do not dispute the myriad problems that led to people being improperly detained after they should have been released. The lawsuit has been certified as a class action by a judge and is expected to cost the city tens of millions of dollars.
But while the lawsuit was filed in 2017, the case continues to stall as more inmates like Melloan become new plaintiffs. Now, attorneys for the former inmates have accused the city of deliberately delaying the case and are asking a federal judge to hold them in contempt.
More than two years ago, as ordered by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings, the city hired an independent auditor to determine how many inmates have been detained for too long.
In a motion filed in August, attorneys for the inmates claimed that the expert failed to do what the judge ordered, missed multiple deadlines and manipulated the data to “artificially reduce” the number of former inmates Metro government would have to pay.
The city’s actions have resulted “in more than two years of wasted time,” according to the contempt motion.
Besides asking for the contempt ruling, the attorneys are asking the city to pay some of the plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees and costs and appoint a “qualified” auditor to collect the necessary data.
“We need to redo what’s been done,” said Greg Belzley, a lawyer who represents the inmates along with Laura Landenwhich and Garry Adams.
Attorneys Laura Landenwhich, Gregory Belzley and Garry Adams. The three represent thousands of former inmates who were detained too long in Louisville's jail.
“Why is this still going on? Why hasn’t (this) been resolved?” Belzley said he is asked by former inmates involved in the suit. “It’s been established. It’s in the documents. … Justice moves too damn slow.”
In late September, the plaintiffs asked the judge to issue a default judgement in favor of the inmates, meaning the only jury trials would be to determine the amount Metro government will pay.
The audit has already been costly for the city and taxpayers, with Metro government paying about $2 million to Dr. Charles D. Cowan of Texas-based Analytic Focus so far, according to information provided to WDRB News in an open records request.
Even former Magistrate Judge Cleveland Gambill, who was assigned to the case to supervise the audit, has criticized the work done so far, saying at one point, “I just think that there was a better way to have done this.”
For the entire seven-year period, Cowan estimated about 6,865 inmates were detained too long, according to a 2023 report.
But the attorneys for the inmates dispute the number and how Cowan arrived at it.
The attorneys argue in court filings that the city for two years has complicated and delayed the resolution of this litigation” while its expert “corrupted the raw data with statistical manipulations.”
Belzley said the judge ordered Cowan to look at raw data, the documents used in the paper-driven system from when inmates were booked in the jail until the time they were released.
Instead, Belzley argues that Cowan applied a statistical error rate with a sample of inmates that comes up with a percentage of people kept too long.
“We don’t know what to believe,” Belzley said. “I want to know what the documents say. The judge said we can’t speculate. We can’t rely on anything that this guy has told us up to this point.”
Jail leaders declined to comment because the lawsuit is ongoing, but city attorneys argued in a September 13 that Metro has been “beyond cooperative” and the auditor was hampered by “missing documentation.”
The city argues the motion for contempt is a “thinly veiled attempt” to increase the cost of litigation and force a larger settlement.
“The fact that Plaintiffs do not agree with Dr. Cowan’s findings is not a basis for sanctions, and Plaintiffs have cited no law to support their contrary position,” according to the city’s filing in response to the contempt motion.
“Plaintiffs seemed quite content to continue to utilize Dr. Cowan (at Defendants’ cost) until they decided that they did not like Dr. Cowan’s conclusion that the actual number of over-detained hours was less than Plaintiffs originally thought. They provide no empirical basis for their disagreement.”
The judge in the case has not yet ruled on the contempt motion or scheduled any hearing date.
Jail Improvements
One thing both sides agree on is Metro Corrections, under new leadership, has finally begun to take steps to solve the problem.
“Over-detentions have been significantly addressed by doing things that were just common sense and required no money by the taxpayers,” Belzley said. “The new director deserves credit for recognizing the problem and taking steps to address it, finally.”
The jail’s director, Jerry Collins, declined to comment on changes made at the jail.
In a deposition taken in March, Mane Martirosyan, executive administrator of Metro Corrections, said that since Collins replaced Dwayne Clark as director in 2022, the jail has made it a priority to speed up the process of releasing inmates.
Martirosyan said the jail has added more employees dedicated solely to the release and booking areas, increased training, updated the paper-drive system where documents were being lost or delayed, created a records committee to continuously work on improving the procedures and meet regularly with court officials to go over any problems.
Employees are also now rewarded for not making errors in releasing inmates.
Perhaps the most important changes have been technological. Paperwork to release inmates is now sent through email “instead of tubes,” Martirosyan said. And she said the jail has entered into a contract with Jail Tracker, a digital software system that will automatically calculate an inmate's release date.
On Thursday, Metro government told the court the new software has been effective since September 22.
During the deposition, Martirosyan was asked if some of these changes “would just appear to be common sense; would you agree with that?”
“Yes,” she responded, adding that most of the changes cost no money.
“By the time (Collins) got there, this problem had been allowed to fester," Belzley said.
A recent city audit also confirms that Metro Corrections has improved the process of releasing inmates on time.
It represents a sea change in the thought process by Metro Corrections of the problems since the lawsuit began in 2017.
Retired Metro Corrections Director Mark Bolton and the man who replaced him — Bolton's longtime deputy, Dwayne Clark — knew since at least 2012 that problems in the jail’s records department were causing people to be jailed illegally but did little about it, according to testimony and an audit by the city.
Attorneys described Bolton and Clark as having a “laissez faire” attitude about the issue.
Clark, who oversaw the records unit, had no policy that late releases be reported or explained to him, for example, attorneys said in court records.
And he estimated in court testimony that around 10 people or less are detained too long each year while shifting much of the blame to court employees.
“One is too many, don’t get me wrong, but ten people?” Clark said in his deposition years ago. “It isn’t this big issue as you’re portraying to me. It’s not.”
Clark also testified that many recommendations from audits have not been implemented, in large part because the jail needs not only more funding but the cooperation of the courts and others involved in the process.
The lawsuit applies to anyone since February 2016 who was held at least four hours after serving out a jail sentence and those who were detained at least 12 hours after being ordered released by a judge after making bond or qualifying for home incarceration, among other reasons.
Grady Jennings determined in 2021 that the case had class action status, ruling that the plaintiffs had demonstrated the jail's “failure to implement and maintain an adequate process for timely releasing inmates.”
Also, she ruled the jail does not track why inmates are improperly held and had known about the problem for years but failed to correct it.
The city had asked the Sixth Circuit to deny class-action status for the lawsuit. But in a unanimous 3-0 decision, the Sixth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling, allowing the suit to proceed as a class action case.
Previously, U.S. District Court Judge David Hale, in declining to dismiss the case, said the allegations present a “troubling practice” in which the jail has “systematically failed to comply with state orders pertaining to individuals’ release dates.”
“This is not complicated,” Belzley said in an interview. “This is opening the door and letting people go home.”
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