Metro Council OKs $1 million settlement

• By SCOTT DYER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 15, 2008 - Page: 2B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The Metro Council unanimously agreed Wednesday to pay a $1 million settlement to a Baton Rouge man who served more than 16 years in Angola for a rape he didn’t commit.

Gene Bibbins was cleared of the rape in 2003 by DNA testing and filed a federal lawsuit against the city, and the police officers and technicians who collected the evidence that convicted him.

Councilman David Boneno complained there’s been some misinformation about a second rape to which Bibbins pleaded guilty after he was cleared of the initial rape.

Bibbins maintained the second rape involving a 22-year-old woman in 1985 was consensual sex. But he accepted a plea deal that allowed him to use six years of the time he had already spent in prison to serve as a sentence for that crime.

Assistant Parish Attorney James Hilburn said the federal judge in charge of Bibbin’s lawsuit ruled last year that if the case went to trial, the jury wouldn’t get to hear about Bibbins’ plea deal involving the second rape.

Hilburn said parish attorneys tried unsuccessfully to appeal the ruling by U.S. District Judge James Brady.

The case was slated to go to trial next month if a settlement were not reached, Hilburn said.

The settlement will be paid in increments of $333,333 annually over three years.

Walter Monsour, the mayor’s chief administrative officer, said the city-parish only budgets $1 million per year to settle lawsuits, but may have to make a budget supplement to cover the cost of the Bibbins suit, which is the highest in recent city-parish history.

In his lawsuit over the initial rape conviction, Bibbins claims investigating police officers ignored the 13-year-old victim’s description of the rapist as having long curly hair. Instead, the lawsuit claims that police focused on Bibbins, who had short hair, because he had picked up a radio that was stolen from the girl’s room by the rapist.

Councilwoman Lorri Burgess said she thinks the $1 million settlement is still too low.

Burgess noted that a man who was wrongfully incarcerated in another state for only 60 days was recently awarded $2 million in damages.

Burgess noted that Bibbins will only get about $600,000 from the settlement after his attorneys are paid and a contribution is made to the Innocence Project, which used DNA evidence to clear him of the initial rape.