An African-American woman, whose wrists and ankles were shackled to a hospital bed in New York by police while she was in labour, has settled a lawsuit she had filed against the city and several police department officers for allegedly causing emotional distress and violating her civil rights, a media report said.
She has received $750,000 for settling the suit, the New York Post reported. The unnamed woman, a mother of two, was arrested at her home on December 17, 2018, on assault charges for an incident that allegedly happened the week before. She went into labour the same day she was arrested, according to the lawsuit. It also stated that the woman’s wrists and ankles were shackled by police for hours while she was giving birth at a hospital. The baby’s father was also not present there, it added.“My only support was the nurse that was helping me,” she said.
Speaking anonymously to CNN, she said that she “felt like a failure” to her unborn child and she is still in pain from that traumatic incident.According to the suit, a police officer allegedly claimed that he could not remove the restraints because of unspecified instruction. He finally agreed to remove them after pursuation from nurses who told him that she must start pushing and the handcuffs were preventing the woman from receiving an epidural, a procedure that injects a local anaesthetic into the lower back to block the pain from labour contractions.
Her attorney argued during the hearing that her baby’s first breath was born out of violence, which the New York Police Department did to her. The report said NYPD declined to comment and the city’s law department didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The settlement, however, states that it is not an admission by the defendants that they violated the woman’s rights.
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