The AP reports that an all-white Kentucky jury awarded a Latino teen $2.5 million in a civil lawsuit brought on his behalf by the Southern Poverty Law Center after the teen was severely beaten by two members of a Kentucky chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
The teen suffered a broken jaw and left forearm, cracked ribs and cuts and bruises. One of his assailants outweighed him by 150 pounds.
The two klansmen had already been sentenced to prison and the lawsuit was against the chapter and its leaders for inciting the violence. A motivating force in the lawsuit was to bankrupt the racist organization.
At the trial, one klansman, Kale Todd Kelly, testified that one of the named defendants, imperial grand wizard Ron Edwards, plotted to kill one of the founders of the Southern Poverty Law Center, civil rights attorney Morris Dees, because of a lawsuit he brought against another white supremacist group, Aryan Nations, in 1999. The plot failed when the FBI infiltrated the group. The testimony was elicited to show how the klan chapter encouraged its members to commit violent acts against its opponents.
This is one more example of how the civil justice system can be used to accomplish laudable objectives. If, however, punitive damages in civil cases are subject to caps–as is the recent trend in the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit–it could impede the ability to accomplish goals like the one sought in this Kentucky case.
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