A homeless Liberian immigrant who spent 31 days locked up at the Adult Correctional Institutions for a crime he didn’t commit has notified the City of Woonsocket that he plans to sue for damages.
A lawyer representing Mack Blackie, 36, filed a notice of claim with the city on Wednesday, that his client is seeking damages in excess of $100,000 for allegedly violating Blackie’s Fourth Amendment right to protection from unlawful searches and seizures without probable cause. (Rhode Island law requires municipalities to be notified in advance of filing legal claims and be given 40 days to respond.)
“This is beyond negligence,’’ said Joshua D. Xavier, a Warwick lawyer who volunteers for the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which referred Blackie’s case to him. “This is intentional conduct in which the officer knowingly failed or refused to follow city police policy.’’
Blackie was wrongfully arrested and detained twice in 2022 and charged with breaking into the apartment of a Woonsocket couple. The first time, police held him overnight at the police station and the next morning, during his arraignment in court, Blackie collapsed. He was admitted to the intensive care unit at Landmark Medical Center, where he was treated for severe alcohol withdrawal. Two months later, Blackie was six weeks sober and heading to a free lunch at a park in Woonsocket when police arrested him again on a warrant for the same breaking and entering charge.
He spent more a month locked up at the ACI on the felony charge because he couldn’t afford to pay the $100 on his $1,000 surety bail. A social worker at Safe Haven, a drop-in center for people who are homeless, raised the $100 to pay his $1,000 surety bail. (Blackie’s struggle to regain his health and sobriety were chronicled in the 2022 series, Chasing The Fix.)
It wasn’t until a court hearing in February 2023 that the crime’s only witnesses finally got a look at the man police had charged with breaking into their apartment. And the couple said they knew instantly: the police had arrested the wrong man.
According to the claim filed against the city by Blackie’s lawyer, a Woonsocket police officer filed a “false affidavit” in support of Blackie’s arrest in August of 2022 and again the following October. The officer falsely “insinuated” that the couple who reported a break-in at their apartment had identified Mack Blackie as a suspect, Xavier, his lawyer, said, which they had not.
The police detective overseeing the investigation told the couple reporting the break-in that he would arrange a photo line-up so they could I.D. the suspect, but never did. (Woonsocket police suspended the officer, Timothy M. Hammond, without pay for 10 days and demoted him to patrol officer.)
Xavier called the police conduct “egregious,” and said that he and his client plan to seek “punitive damages for the reckless and callous indifference…to Mr. Blackie’s rights” and his “significant emotional distress, pain and suffering.”
Blackie said that his heart still races whenever he sees the police. “Sometimes when I’m walking on the street, you know…when I see cops, I get scared,’’ he said. “I still have that anxiety that…they might do the same thing” again.
Blackie, who has been sober now for two years, is still homeless. He said he’s been couch-surfing at friends’ houses and working two jobs: tagging clothes and shoes during the day at a store in Woonsocket; and loading trucks at night for a food-service company in Massachusetts. He wants to save up and buy a car so he can work weekends as a Lyft driver.
He said he hopes that his claim against the city will give him more peace of mind.
“It wasn’t right what they did to me,’’ he said.
Woonsocket City Council President John Ward, a candidate for mayor, said that he was unaware of the claim. However, he said, the Woonsocket solicitor had notified the city’s insurance company, the Rhode Island Interlocal Risk Management Trust, about possible claims related to Blackie’s case when it first came to light a year ago. The city council would only get involved, Ward said, “if there was a settlement to be considered after the Interlocal Trust handled the matter.’’
Lynn Arditi, health reporter at The Public’s Radio, can be reached at larditi@thepublicsradio.org.