A federal appeals panel has reinstated a 10-year-old lawsuit against Hudson County and its former jail director, less than a year after a former high-ranking jail official caught up in the same suit was ordered to pay more than $1.1 million.
Six days into the 2023 trial over the 2014 federal lawsuit filed by former union president Luis Ocasio, claiming harassment, retaliation and other civil rights violations, the county and then-jail Director Oscar Aviles were dismissed from the litigation, leaving only then-Deputy Director Kirk Eady named in the suit.
Eady, who was found guilty of illegally wiretapping co-workers in March 2015, was found responsible at a jury trial last year and in August he was ordered to pay $662,000 in back pay and damages, as well as more than $519,000 in attorneys’ fees.
Ocasio appealed the decision on Aviles and the county, and Wednesday the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal and remanded the claims against Aviles and the county for trial. Aviles currently is the assistant Hudson County administrator.
The nine-page ruling said the federal court in Newark “prematurely ruled that Aviles and the county defendants were not subject to Monell liabilities,” referring to violations that result from an official agency policy, an unofficial custom, or because the agency was deliberately indifferent in a failure to train or supervise the officer.
The county and Aviles had successfully argued before the lower federal court last year that they were not responsible for Eady’s actions.
County spokesman Mark Cygan said the county plans to appeal the decision to the full Third Circuit panel, noting that one of the three judges on the panel disagreed with the ruling.
“As the judge who authored the dissenting opinion and the trial court judge both recognized, the actions taken by Kirk Eady were not approved by the county,” Cygan said. “We’re confident that when reviewed by the entire en banc panel, we’ll be vindicated.”
The Third Circuit ruling noted that Ocasio “presented evidence from which a reasonable jury could have concluded that Aviles, the relevant policymaker, was deliberately indifferent, i.e., that he failed to ‘train, discipline or control’ Eady in response to ‘contemporaneous knowledge’ of his misdeeds or ‘knowledge of a prior pattern of similar incidents.’ "
The decision noted that Ocasio testified at trial that when he submitted a tort claim notice to the county over Eady’s wiretapping of his and other union members’ phone calls, Aviles took no action to investigate the allegations, discipline Eady, or insulate Ocasio or the other union members from Eady’s control.
The panel pointed to another example that showed why Ocasio’s claim should be presented to a jury.
“A reasonable jury also could have found that the defendants’ revocation of Ocasio’s ‘full union release time’ — the county’s longstanding practice of allowing the union president to spend unlimited hours working on union-related matters during his regular shift — constituted an impermissible policy of retaliation,” the decision said.
Defending the decision, Aviles testified “he and other county officials revoked the full release time in response to a recent state report calculating the high taxpayer costs associated with public employee union benefits, including release time.” It’s possibly the first and only time in county history that officials implemented changes based on a state taxpayer abuse report — and it came at the expense of a union worker, not the wallets of any county officials.
Ocasio’s 2014 lawsuit made a host of allegations, including that Eady made threatening phone calls to him because Ocasio uncovered Eady’s and Aviles’ alleged abuse of the state pension system; that Aviles changed county policy to allow Eady to wield discipline as a disciplinary tool; that Aviles did nothing when he learned about Eady’s alleged threats; and that Eady retaliated against Ocasio for reporting an incident of sexual harassment involving Eady’s friend.
