An Inmate Serving Double Life Buzzed Himself Out of His Own Locked Pod and Into Another. He Beat and Choked a Man for Three and a Half Minutes While No Staff Came.
After trial: Treat this as a verdict on appeal, not as money received. A unanimous jury in the District of Montana, Great Falls Division, returned $27,750,000 on April 24, 2025, widely reported as $28 million, and no reduction has been reported. CoreCivic stated on April 25, 2025 that it would appeal on several legal grounds. We found no post-trial ruling and no appellate decision as of September 3, 2026. The action was originally filed in Toole County District Court in December 2021 and reached federal court from there; the docket number was not obtained because CourtListener and govinfo were both rate-limited during this research. On caps, the single most important structural fact is that none applies, because CoreCivic is a private corporation: MCA section 2-9-108's $750,000 per claim and $1.5 million per occurrence limit is available only to governmental entities, as is the correctional-facility immunity in the same section, which in any event excepts serious bodily injury. An identical injury in a state-run Montana prison would have been capped at $750,000. The liability finding is federal, under 42 U.S.C. section 1983 and the Eighth Amendment, so Montana's punitive cap in section 27-1-220(3) would not govern any punitive component, and no punitive and compensatory split was reported.
At CoreCivic's Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby, Montana, an inmate serving a double life sentence let himself out of his own locked pod and into Nathaniel Lake's, then beat and choked him for more than three and a half minutes with no staff intervention. Lake was in a coma for 33 days and has a permanent brain injury.
What happened
On September 17, 2018, at CoreCivic's Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby, Montana, an inmate serving a double life sentence for deliberate homicide let himself out of his own locked pod.
He had assaulted people eleven times before. He buzzed himself through, walked into Nathaniel Lake's pod, went to Lake's cell, and beat and choked him for more than three and a half minutes. No staff intervened. A guard found Lake at the lockdown count.
Lake was flown to Great Falls. He was in a coma for 33 days and spent four months in intensive care. He had to relearn how to walk and how to speak. He has a permanent traumatic brain injury and will likely need care for the rest of his life.
On April 24, 2025 a unanimous federal jury found CoreCivic deliberately indifferent in violation of the Eighth Amendment, on inadequate staffing and supervision, and awarded $27,750,000.
There is a fact about Lake that belongs in any honest account of this case. He was in custody on a conviction the Montana Supreme Court vacated in 2019. The Missoula County Attorney declined to refile. He has no criminal record.
And there is a structural fact that explains the size of the number better than anything about the injury does. CoreCivic is a private Tennessee corporation. Montana Code Annotated § 2-9-108 caps governmental liability at $750,000 per claim and $1.5 million per occurrence, and that cap is available only to governmental entities. The correctional-facility immunity in the same section likewise runs only to governmental entities, and in any event excepts serious bodily injury.
So an identical injury, inflicted the same way in a state-run Montana prison, would have been capped at $750,000. This one was not capped at all, because the prison was privately operated.
Lake was represented by John Heenan of Heenan and Cook in Billings, with Bechtold Law of Missoula as co-counsel.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Daily Montanan, Keila Szpaller, April 25, 2025: the verdict, the Shelby facility and the assault, Lake's injuries and coma, the vacated conviction and the declined refiling, CoreCivic's statement that it would appeal on several legal grounds, and counsel named independently of the firm, 'the law firm representing him, Heenan and Cook of Billings', with 'Lake is also represented by Bechtold Law in Missoula'
- 2.Cowboy State Daily, April 28, 2025: independent report of the verdict and the $27.75 million figure
- 3.MTN News/KPAX, April 30, 2025: independent report of the verdict and the assault at the Shelby prison
More proven verdicts from Heenan & Cook Injury and Accident Attorneys
All Heenan & Cook Injury and Accident Attorneys proven verdicts →A federal jury awarded $15 million to two families whose loved ones died at Canyon Creek Memory Care during a 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, finding the Billings facility and its parent company Koelsch Senior Communities liable for neglect through chronic understaffing.
Heenan and Cook secured a $9 million settlement from Custer County District High School on behalf of 32 former student athletes who were sexually abused over decades by longtime school athletic trainer James 'Doc' Jensen.
In 2015 a woman on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation called authorities because she was worried someone might be drinking and driving. The Bureau of Indian Affairs officer who responded assaulted her. A federal judge fixed damages at $1.6 million in 2020, and after nearly a decade of litigation over whether the United States was responsible, ordered it to pay in 2025.
After nearly a decade of litigation, a federal judge confirmed the U.S. government liable for a BIA officer who coerced a Northern Cheyenne woman into sex during a 2015 welfare call, affirming $1.6 million in damages.
Related civil rights verdicts
Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis served as court-appointed co-lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation over Capital One's 2019 data breach, which exposed the personal information of roughly 98 million U.S. customers. The $190 million settlement won final approval in 2022 as one of the largest data breach recoveries in U.S. history.
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.
As court-appointed lead plaintiffs' counsel, Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis negotiated the $117.5 million settlement resolving claims from Yahoo's 2013-2016 data breaches, the largest theft of personal data in history, touching roughly 3 billion accounts worldwide. Judge Lucy Koh approved the fund in 2020 after rejecting an earlier version as inadequate.
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.