Columbus loses appeal in federal lawsuit over alleged racially motivated jail slaying

The city of Columbus has lost another round in a lawsuit over the death of a white jail inmate allegedly slain by a Black cellmate angered by online video of police killing a Black man in 2020.

The lawsuit accuses Muscogee County Jail staff of failing to protect inmate Eddie Nelson Jr., who investigators say was strangled by cellmate Jayvon Rayshawn Hatchett days after Hatchett stabbed a white auto parts store worker.

Hatchett, who was convicted of aggravated assault for stabbing store worker Michael Hunt, told police he attacked Hunt on Aug. 25, 2020, because Hunt was the first white person he saw.

Hatchett said he was angered by a video related to the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wis., investigators said.

The jail housed Hatchett with white cellmates, and he allegedly killed Nelson when they were alone in their cell on Sept. 5, 2020.

Nelson’s brother and widow filed suit, claiming a corrections officer and a nurse who heard why Hatchett stabbed Hunt should have reported that to jail workers deciding where to place Hatchett.

The officer, Keyvon Sellers, claimed to have “qualified immunity,” which means he can’t be held liable just for doing his job, unless he clearly breaks the law. The legal protection is intended to ward off trivial lawsuits over routine law enforcement procedures.

The nurse, employed by an independent contractor providing jail medical services, is not entitled to that same protection.

U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land decided in 2022 that the suit filed by Nelson’s family raised a valid issue worth presenting to a jury, which could find Sellers was at fault. Land rejected Sellers’ immunity claim.

Attorneys representing Sellers, on behalf of the city government, appealed Land’s decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Friday affirmed Land’s ruling.

That means the lawsuit could proceed to a jury trial, possibly by September, said attorney Craig Jones of Washington, Georgia, who represents Nelson’s brother Jerry Nelson and widow Michele Dushane.

The city, represented by attorneys from Page, Scrantom, Sprouse, Tucker & Ford, could appeal the 11th Circuit opinion, which came from a three-judge panel of the appeals court. They could appeal to the entire circuit court, or to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We are disappointed with the ruling, but appreciate the court’s attention to the matter, and we are evaluating all options,” attorney Thomas Gristina with Page-Scrantom said in a statement Monday.

The background

Hatchett was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a jury in March 2023 found him guilty in the attack on the AutoZone worker. He has yet to face trial in Nelson’s homicide.

The evidence showed Hatchett walked from his girlfriend’s apartment to the Auto Zone a few blocks away at at 950 32nd St., and asked Hunt about a temperature gauge before stabbing him seven times in the back, puncturing Hunt’s right lung.

Hatchett, who was 19 at the time, ran from the store after Hunt’s coworkers intervened. He returned to his girlfriend’s apartment, where he was arrested for Hunt’s stabbing on Aug. 26, 2020, and booked into the jail.

No report detailed the nature of Hunt’s assault, at the time, but the police corporal bringing Hatchett to jail told Sellers about it, and so did Hatchett.

After a jail nurse gave Hatchett a medical screening, the police corporal took him to Sellers, to have him booked in.

“Tell this officer what you did,” the corporal told Hatchett.

“I was watching the news and I decided I was gonna’ stab a white guy,” Hatchett said.

He also told the jail nurse why he stabbed Hunt, but neither Sellers nor the nurse reported his comments.

Hatchett was housed with another white cellmate before Nelson joined them, and no disputes between the men were reported until around 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 5, 2020, when an inmate next door flagged down a corrections officer, directing him to Hatchett’s cell.

The officer saw Hatchett atop Nelson, strangling him as Nelson lay on his back covered in blood. Hatchett would not desist, when ordered to, and told the officer, “He put a hair in my sandwich.”

Nelson, 39, could not be revived, and was pronounced dead in the cell.

The court ruling

Nelson’s family first filed suit Sept. 7, 2020 against those who at the time were running the jail: then-Muscogee County Sheriff Donna Tompkins and her staff.

Those administrators since have been removed from the suit, and Judge Land has found that others were not liable.

Land narrowed the remaining defendants to Sellers, to the jail nurse who heard Hatchett’s motivation for the stabbing, and to her employer.

Though Sellers no longer works for the city, Page-Scranton still represents him on behalf the Columbus Consolidated Government, as it was his employer at the time.

Under the 14th Amendment ensuring equal protection, corrections officers can violate an inmate’s civil rights if through “deliberate indifference” if they put those in their care at risk. That can include housing them with a notably violent cellmate.

The circuit panel heard arguments in September, when attorneys for Sellers said no court decision was precisely on point in deciding whether a corrections officer in these peculiar circumstances is entitled to immunity.

As they posed it in their court filings, the question was:

“If a jail intake officer is aware that an inmate was imprisoned for aggravated assault motivated by race, is it deliberate indifference to not take steps to isolate the inmate?”

The court’s ruling could have set a precedent for dealing with inmates’ endangering others based on a racial motivation, they argued.

In Friday’s decision, Judge Nancy Abudu wrote a concurring opinion saying the court had broken new ground, with its ruling.

She said the court had just recognized that “any evidence of racial animus — even when there may be other motivations behind the assailant’s actions — is sufficient to overcome qualified immunity under these circumstances,” and added, “I hope these tenants remain true for subsequent cases brought by plaintiffs regarding the threats and violence they have faced while incarcerated.”

Another circuit court judge, Ed Carnes, refuted that, in a concurring opinion responding to Abudu.

It was not Hatchett’s motivation that mattered, he wrote, but the danger he presented to other inmates, regardless of the reason for it.

Carnes said “our circuit law does not suggest, let alone establish, that any time an inmate assaults another inmate for racial reasons some prison official has in some way violated the Constitution. And our decision today does not suggest that either.”

He added: “A prison official violates the Constitution only when the inmate can show that he was ‘incarcerated under conditions posing a substantial risk of serious harm’ ... and that the official knew of and consciously disregarded that substantial risk, and that the official’s action or inaction caused injury.”

The panel’s decision does not strip Sellers of his immunity claim, as a trial jury still could decide he’s entitled to that protection, and hold him blameless in Nelson’s death.

Hatchett now is incarcerated at the Wilcox State Prison in Abbeville, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections. He started serving his sentence on April 20, 2023, and he is 23 years old now.