Inmates to get compensation 20 years after prison fracas

Al­most two decades af­ter they were beat­en by prison and po­lice of­fi­cers dur­ing a ri­ot at the Gold­en Grove State Prison in Arou­ca, a group of for­mer and cur­rent in­mates are fi­nal­ly set to re­ceive com­pen­sa­tion.

De­liv­er­ing a judg­ment yes­ter­day, five Law Lords of the Unit­ed King­dom-based Privy Coun­cil ruled that two out of three Ap­peal Court Judges got it wrong when they weighed in on the group’s class ac­tion law­suit in 2021.

In the ap­peal, the Privy Coun­cil had to con­sid­er whether the lo­cal ap­pel­late court had the pow­er to in­ter­fere with an agree­ment be­tween the in­mates for their in­di­vid­ual as­sault and bat­tery cas­es to be de­fined by the out­comes of test cas­es from three of them.