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RIBCO
News
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2006-10-22
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Judge Blocks Firing of Officers |
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Judge Stephen Fortunato says the three ACI correctional officers were not given a fair termination hearing.
BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE - A Superior Court judge yesterday blocked, for now, the firing of three correctional officers accused of assaulting inmates because, the judge said, they had not been given a fair termination hearing.
Judge Stephen Fortunato said he was granting the officers' request for a temporary restraining order because the Department of Corrections had not allowed the three to present witnesses at their pre-termination hearing last month.
"It would seem other witnesses should have been able to present their position if there were to be a meaningful hearing," Fortunato said.
The three officers - all on paid suspension pending the outcome of similar criminal charges against them - were fired by Adult Correctional Institutions Director A. T. Wall effective today after an internal administrative hearing found numerous violations of departmental policy involving other inmates.
The officers are: Capt. Gualter Botas, 38, of Pawtucket; Lt. Kenneth J. Viveiros, 54, of North Providence; and Officer Ernest Spaziano, 38, of Burrillville.
Corrections lawyer Patricia Coyne-Ague said she planned to appeal Fortunato's decision to the state Supreme Court, arguing, in effect, that Fortunato had no authority to enter a labor dispute.
"We shouldn't be in court to begin with," she said. "The Brotherhood of Correctional Officers bargained for a process and that's the process they should use."
Coyne-Ague was referring to the collective bargaining agreement that the department and the Brotherhood have signed, which calls for binding arbitration in such labor disputes.
Coyne-Ague told Fortunato that the department had already agreed to move swiftly in the three officers' arbitration appeal and that the court should bow to that process, scheduled to begin in December.
But Paul Giacobe, the lawyer representing the three correctional officers, argued that the guards' status should remain the same - suspended with pay - pending the outcome of their arbitration.
Union representatives had alleged that the department treated the three men unfairly by not allowing witnesses at their pre-termination hearing; union grievance officer Kenneth Rivard said that for at least 20 years witnesses had been allowed at all similar hearings.
But Coyne-Ague said that the department had fired employees in the past without granting them the opportunity to present witnesses at their hearings.
"These three corrections officers, she said, are accused of especially egregios violations" of the department's ethics code, including the allegation that Botas forced an inmate to taste his own feces. |
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