A Philadelphia man, whose claims of brutality led to three Deptford police officers being charged in 2006, received $200,000 to settle a lawsuit he filed against the township.
The confidential agreement reached between Joseph Rao and the township earlier this year called for Deptford's insurance carrier to write the check. The township admitted no wrongdoing.
"It's a regrettable amount of money," Deptford Mayor Paul Medany said when reached for comment on Tuesday. "We don't want to pay any amount of money. ... We took the insurance company's suggestion of a settlement and we thought that was the best route to take."
Records show the agreement was approved in March and the case was dismissed in court in May. The agreement, which has been obtained by the Times, called for neither side to disclose any "facts, amounts and terms" of the deal.
Rao sought $4 million when he filed his federal lawsuit last year.
The decision was made to do "what's best for the taxpayers" and settle, according to Medany.
"The incident happened," said Medany. "There's nothing we can do about it. We're just trying to make things right."
The three officers, who faced prison terms, were cleared of all charges. Ptl. John Gillespie went to trial and was found not guilty. The Gloucester County prosecutor's office then dismissed its cases against Ptl. Timothy Parks and Ptl. Brian Green. All three officers have since returned to the force.
Medany called the whole situation an opportunity to improve how things are handled within the police department.
"In the meantime, we've changed our operating procedures and gone into better training," the mayor said. "We took the incident and learned from it, there's no doubt about that. It hasn't happened since and, hopefully, it will never happen again."
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More of the story: http://www.nj.com/gloucester/index.ssf?/base/news-0/124884511083120.xml&coll=8&thispage=2
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