$500,000 Judgment After Alaska Jail Moved Suicidal Man to a Cell Alone Eleven Days After Booking
After trial: Final judgment entered March 31, 2026 on an accepted offer of judgment, with an express non-admission of fault. The $500,000 includes attorney's fees.
Won by ACLU of Alaska.
James Rider, 31, of Wasilla, told staff at the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility in Palmer that he was having thoughts of suicide when he was booked in August 2022. He was put on precaution for a day, then housed with other inmates, then, about eleven days after booking, moved to a cell alone. Within hours he hanged himself with bedsheets. The ACLU of Alaska sued the Department of Corrections on behalf of his brother and the mother of his child. In March 2026 the state made an offer of judgment for $500,000, with a clause saying it admitted no fault, and the family accepted.
What happened
James Rider was 31, from Wasilla, a father of three. In August 2022 he was arrested for a probation violation and booked into the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility in Palmer. At intake he told staff he was having thoughts of suicide.
According to his autopsy report, he was kept on precaution for one day and then moved into a cell with two other inmates. Five days later he was transferred to Cell 8 in the Charlie Dorm, where he was the only person in the cell. Within hours he hanged himself with bedsheets. He had been seen alive about 20 minutes before a scheduled cell check found him. His brother, Mike Cox, said a neurosurgeon told the family he had gone at least half an hour without oxygen before CPR began.
Rider was one of 18 people who died in Alaska jails and prisons in 2022, a record at the time. The Department of Corrections said it had done everything by the book, with visual checks every half hour. The family could find no documentation of why he had been taken off suicide watch.
In August 2023 the ACLU of Alaska filed suit in Anchorage Superior Court on behalf of his brother and the mother of his child. The complaint said Rider had been placed alone in a cell despite being a known suicide risk, and that isolating a suicidal person contradicted decades of established correctional guidelines. It asked for damages, attorney's fees, and an independent review of the department's suicide-watch protocols, staffing and use of solitary confinement.
The case ended with an offer of judgment. The Department of Corrections offered $500,000, inclusive of attorney's fees, with a clause stating that the offer was not an admission of fault or liability for Rider's death. The family accepted, and on March 31, 2026 Anchorage Superior Court Judge Dani Crosby entered final judgment. The judgment requires no change to how the department operates.
"This hopefully, not only will it bring, hopefully bring awareness, but hopefully it helps the DOC kind of see what was right, what was wrong, and then move forward," Tamara Halliburton, the mother of one of his children, told Alaska's News Source.
The ACLU of Alaska is a nonprofit civil-rights organization rather than a law firm, and it has no directory profile here. It is recorded as counsel because it was.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
Related civil rights verdicts
An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.
On December 14, 2019 Emily Gaines, an 18-year-old Moore High School senior, was driving to take the ACT when Sgt. Kyle Lloyd of the Moore Police Department, off duty and rushing a key to another officer's patrol car for a department event, hit her broadside at 95 to 100 mph in a 50 zone. She died at the scene. On April 1, 2026 a federal jury returned $126,000,000. The court entered $90,000,000 against Lloyd, who is in prison, and cut the $36,000,000 against the City to $125,000 under Oklahoma's Governmental Tort Claims Act.
The Popham Law Firm secured a $57 million settlement on behalf of more than 1,700 Sprint employees who alleged the company's automated performance system unlawfully targeted workers over 40 during a series of mass layoffs, at the time the largest ADEA class settlement in the District of Kansas.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.