By Lisa Backus
The Register Citizen, Torrington, Conn.
NEWTON, Conn. — A former Massachusetts inmate serving time in Connecticut as part of an interstate prisoner compact was awarded $1.3 million by a jury in October following a federal trial on claims he was stabbed repeatedly by a correction officer.
Justin Mustafa, 35, of Massachusetts, filed a federal lawsuit against the state Department of Correction in 2019 after spending seven months in Connecticut prisons, court documents show.
“I was up to my eyeballs in situations of brutality,” Mustafa said. “I think it went in front of a jury and they made the right decision. They were trying to get away with it, and that’s not fair.”
Officials from the office of state Attorney General William Tong who represented the DOC and the correction officer in the case said they were examining the verdict and the award and looking at “next steps.”
Tong’s office already has filed a motion to get a new trial on the grounds that “no reasonable jury” could find that the correction officer was doing anything other than trying to maintain order in Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, where the incident occurred.
After a three-day trial in federal court in New Haven in early October, the jury rendered a verdict in favor of Mustafa, awarding him $1.8 million, which was reduced to $1.3 million due to an error in their calculations, court documents said.
Mustafa claimed in his lawsuit that Connecticut correction officer Christopher Byars, now a captain, stabbed him repeatedly with a five- or six-inch-long key after telling the inmate he had provided him with a “special meal.”
He contended in the original handwritten lawsuit that he was concerned that Byars had tampered with his food. Mustafa said as two engaged in a tussle over shutting the food tray door, Byars used the key to stab him several times, leaving him bleeding and with lasting nerve damage.
Mustafa, Byars and a second correction officer were the only witnesses called to the stand during the trial, court papers said.
The state claimed Byars did nothing wrong and only gave Mustafa a “hand strike” to get the inmate to close the food tray door, documents said.
According to Mustafa’s lawsuit, however, Byars stabbed him several times with the key and then left him injured and bloody. It wasn’t until Mustafa smeared his blood on the window of the cell that he was provided medical attention, the lawsuit said.
“He was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment when Defendant Byars struck him in the hand with a metal key, causing a permanent injury,” trial documents said. Mustafa alleged that Byar’s actions “constitute excessive force and violate the 8th Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
After the encounter, several correction officers, including supervisors, refused to report the incident to state police to be investigated as an assault, Mustafa said in court papers. The next day, a different correction officer purposely “catapulted” a cup of juice at him in retaliation for the incident before saying, “you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” according to court documents.
The state sought to get the lawsuit dismissed by requesting summary judgement in 2022, claiming in part that Mustafa didn’t file a grievance in a timely fashion. A federal judge disagreed, saying the grievance had been filed properly, documents show. The judge removed some of the other claims of brutality that Mustafa had filed and allowed the portion of the lawsuit involving Byars and the second correction officer who threw the juice to move forward. The second correction officer was removed from the lawsuit before the start of the trial, leaving only the assault claims, court documents show.
Mustafa had been convicted in Massachusetts in a domestic violence incident and a shooting and had spent time in prison in that state before being moved to Connecticut as part of the compact in 2019, he said. He was in Connecticut for seven months, during which the assault took place, before he was transferred back to Massachusetts in September 2019, court records show.
He since has served his sentence and was released in 2021, he said. He’s happy about the verdict, but conceded he hasn’t seen any of the money and doesn’t expect to for quite some time. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
“You can’t just send people to jail who are going to get back into the community and brutalize them,” Mustafa said.
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