Connecticut Pays $9 Million, Its Largest Settlement Ever to One Person, for the Videotaped Abuse of a Patient at Its Maximum-Security Psychiatric Hospital

W.S. has lived inside Whiting Forensic Hospital, Connecticut's maximum-security psychiatric facility in Middletown, since 1995, when he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the death of his father in Greenwich. He is profoundly mentally ill and wholly dependent on the state employees who staff his unit. In early 2017, over a span of 24 days, the hospital's own surveillance cameras recorded what those employees did to him: more than 50 separate incidents in which forensic nurses and treatment aides kicked him, hit him, doused him with liquids, threw food at him, forced a diaper onto his head and, in one recorded episode, a male nurse gyrated his groin against W.S.'s face. The abuse was not hidden. It happened in the open, on camera, in front of colleagues, and his family's lawyer described it as years of regular physical and psychological torture.

The footage set off the largest abuse scandal in the history of the state's mental health system. Nearly 40 Whiting employees were fired. Ten were arrested; nine were convicted, and eight were sentenced to prison. Nurse Mark Cusson was convicted by a jury of three felony counts of cruelty to persons and five counts of disorderly conduct and was still serving a multi-year sentence when the civil case ended. The state also removed the hospital's chief of patient care services.

On March 1, 2018, W.S.'s brother and legal conservator, Albert Shehadi, filed two lawsuits with Antonio Ponvert III of Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder. The state-court action, in Connecticut Superior Court, named the State of Connecticut, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, its commissioner and 11 Whiting administrators and supervisors, and alleged violations of the U.S. Constitution and the Connecticut Patients' Bill of Rights. The federal action, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, named the forensic nurses and treatment specialists who had carried out the abuse.

A settlement with the state required the legislature's approval. In April 2022 the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee voted to approve a $9 million payment, with the Attorney General's office telling lawmakers that surveillance video had confirmed many of the allegations and that W.S. continued to suffer post-traumatic stress and emotional distress. On June 28, 2022, Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis approved the settlement. Ponvert said it was the largest amount the state had ever paid to a single person. The agreement went beyond the money: Connecticut gave up its claim to more than $8 million it said W.S. owed for nearly 30 years in state custody, and it agreed to substantial injunctive relief, including constant video monitoring of W.S. for as long as he remains at Whiting. The former chief of patient care services paid an additional, undisclosed sum, and the individual staff sued in federal court settled separately for undisclosed amounts.

Ponvert said the goal of the litigation had been to hold abusers and state officials accountable for the torture of a profoundly vulnerable human being who depended on them for care, and that no one is above the law, least of all those responsible for the state's most helpless citizens. He added a warning to mental health workers everywhere: violate that duty toward people in custody and you will go to jail. Albert Shehadi said it was hard to comprehend the level of systemic failure that allowed someone so incapacitated to be brutally abused so openly for so long.