Today Daniel Chong has settled his $20 million lawsuit against the DEA, for $4.1 million. I don't think that is fair compensation for what he went through. What do you think?

“Nobody responsible for the incident has been disciplined…”

I think every one of the DEA agents on that raid should be forced to endure Chong’s identical nightmare.

What would be fair compensation? Compensatory damages are far easier to assess in business dealings, where we can make fairly reliable estimates of what was lost as the result of a breach of contract or whatever other violation of civil law was involved. In cases like this, though, it doesn’t seem to me that any amount of money could truly make up for what happened. So if no number is the correct number, all we can hope is that Daniel Chong is reasonably happy with the settlement amount.

If we want to go beyond issues of compensation and into questions about justice and/or punishment, then there is certainly some merit to the suggestion made by @RealEyesRealizeRealLies. Given that the basis for the original complaint is that no one should have to go through what Chong went through, however, it seems to me that a just resolution would involve the firing of those directly responsible and the disciplining of anyone else who may have had an indirect hand in the incident.

I’m not sure what dollar amount is to be placed on the settlement for what happened to this poor individual but I am very happy that he is being compensated. This is only one incident with one governmental agency (and it is an appalling incident, in my opinion) and there are other governmental agencies that have done just as bad or worse (i.e. – FBI at Ruby Ridge and Waco, CIA (no explanations needed there), NSA (serious invasion of privacy issues) and on and on.

Many U.S. government agencies don’t have nearly enough oversight and have too much flexibility to interpret laws and actions to meet their own agendas without any repercussions from higer branches of government, such as the Justice Department. It is a sad commentary, among many, regarding just one of a myriad of glaring problems with our government.

The agents who forgot him should be fired and charged with assault or some other crime.
Sadly, the $4 million will come out of taxpayers’ pockets not from the agents who actually did the ‘crime’. They are not being punished. We are. That is the only problem I have with the settlement.

Unrelated but related… I’ll bet you could find a lot of people willing to have themselves chained to a pipe in a dark room for 4 days for even $1 million.

Apparently he has found it fair enough to settle. Since he was the victim, I’m not going to second-guess him.

@GoldieAV16 You are not the victim, on what basis do you say it is not fair compensation? As others have noted, he is the only one that can say what is fair or not fair.

I was more upset about the CBS radio reporter in San Diego who said he “was getting a handsome payday”.

His health may have been permanently affected by this. How do you put a price on that?

@zenvelo I can only say what I think is fair from my perspective. I think he should have held out for 10 million. I also think that the US, with all our talk of how other countries should treat their prisoners, should have to pony up big bucks (bigger than what they did). Walk our talk so to speak. This was a horrific egregious error, beyond anything I can even imagine in my worst nightmare.

$4 Million seems like a lot of money for 5 days. Yeah, he almost died, but a lot of it was self inflicted. I’ll go through that for $4 Million.

He gets roughly 3 mil tax free. His lawyer gets the rest. If he is happy with it then thats that. He’s a young person still resilient and handled it well considering. Since then there are now cell inspections and video cameras in cells so things like this don’t happen. So at least there is some silver lining. The stupid fucks plain forgot about him in there. The ones responsible know who they are.

So he now can’t sue the individuals responsible? This covered everything?

@hearkat: I believe that if the individuals responsible were at work, they are not personally responsible, the employer is responsible.