Prison Service to compensate youth

Monday, September 23, 2019, 18:21 A youth who was falsely detained by the police and whose release was delayed for an entire night by prison guards who refused to allow him to call a guarantor to come and release him, as the court instructed, will be compensated with 9,500 NIS in a compromise agreement reached between the sides.
The youth, a Givat Ze’ev resident, was detained last Purim (March 22) near the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, after an altercation had developed between Jewish youths and church personnel. The youth had not taken part in the altercation and in fact had appeared at the site several minutes after it was over. When the youth arrived he was suddenly pounced upon by policemen who had been summoned during the disturbance. The youth was startled by the attempt to detain him and started to flee with several friends who were in the area. The police succeeded in detaining him and he was brought before the court, which ordered the police to release him and his friends on condition of a guarantor’s signature.
At a deliberation held in their case Honenu Attorney Moshe Poleski, who represented the youths, pleaded that the detained youths had not been present during the incident and the youths who had clashed with the church personnel had fled the scene before the detainees arrived.
After the deliberation the detainee represented by Poleski was taken to the detention center at the Nitzan Prison and placed into one of the cells. The detainee requested access to a telephone in order to call a friend who would come and sign on bail for him and allow his release as the court ordered.
However the detainee encountered disgraceful conduct on the part of the prison guards who, despite his pleas, refused to allow the detainee a phone call. Consequently the youth was forced to spend a night in remand, through no fault of his own.
After his release the youth requested assistance from Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado, the head of Honenu’s Civil Cases Department, and together they filed a statement of claim against the Prison Service for the injustice caused the youth. Recently a compromise agreement was reached according to which the Prison Service agreed to pay the youth 9,500 NIS without the need to bring the case before a court. This compensation is another accomplishment for Yado, who has worked extensively to protect the rights of crime victims and citizens who have been injured by the law enforcement authorities through no fault of their own.
Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado stated that, “I would not want to be in the place of the plaintiff, a young man, detained for the first time, through no fault of his own, and then held in prison for an entire night. He pleaded for hours for the guards to allow him to call someone who could sign for him so that he would be released. He was kept for hours in a closed cell without anyone listening to him or paying any attention to him. In the end he spent the night in remand for no reason. For this cruelty of the prison guards the Prison Service is now paying compensation and this is fair recompense. I would like to believe that the illegal and unreasonable conduct of the prison guards will also be rectified.”