A federal judge granted class certification to about 300 former Fulton County Jail inmates who were kept behind bars longer than they should have under a policy that halted releases whenever the state's criminal database broke down.

The order issued Friday by Judge Michael Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia said some inmates stayed in jail for up to five days after they posted bond or should have otherwise been freed. The inmates were held after the Georgia Crime Information System went down for about 10 days in 2014.

The lawsuit accuses Sheriff Ted Jackson and the chief jailer, Col. Mark Adger, of violating the plaintiffs' rights by overdetaining and falsely imprisoning them. Jackson and Adger are being sued in their individual capacities after Brown dismissed claims filed against them in their official capacities.

The county does not dispute that the jail had a policy of refusing to release inmates when the GCIC system was down, which the order said was instituted to determine whether there are outstanding warrants of detention holds.

The order said the county claims that 256 inmates were affected by the policy, while attorney Mark Begnaud said the number was about 313.

Begnaud noted that, at the time of the GCIC outage, the jail was under a federal court order whose provisions included that inmates be released with 24 hours of becoming eligible. 

“This is a civil rights violation on a mass scale,” said Begnaud, who represents the plaintiffs with Horsley Begnaud partner Nathanael Horsley and Stern Law principal Jessica Stern.

Begnaud said some plaintiffs were seriously affected by the jail's refusal to release them.

One man, former Washington Redskins player Sterling Palmer, sat in jail for more than three days without necessary medication, even though he made bond.

In a statement, Stern said she was “was fed up with the Fulton County Jail staff's lack of concern for people's freedom and worth.

“I've seen it for years, but the last straw was having a Fulton sheriff deputy himself remind me that 'You've got to sue these people' in order for anything to change,” she said.

Jackson and Adger are represented by Fulton County Law Department attorneys Steven Rosenberg and Nancy Rowan.

A spokeswoman for Jackson referred queries to County Attorney Patrise Perkins-Hooker, who did not immediately respond on Monday.

According to Begnaud and court filings, the GCIC database went down for about 10 days in November 2014.

“Unfortunately, the GCIC system has a history of outages, some lasting days,” Brown's order said.

Adger “issued a directive allowing the release of inmates during an outage only if the inmates had been booked into the jail within 48 hours of the outage or met certain criteria not applicable here,” the order said.

Among those held beyond their release time was Oswald Thompson Jr., who was booked into the jail on a speeding charge Nov. 13, 2014. His bond was posted the next day, but he remained in jail until Nov. 19, 2014. His charges were nolle prossed, and a judge ordered his release.

Oswald filed a putative class action against Jackson and the county in Fulton County in 2015, and the county had the case transferred to federal court in 2016. The surviving claims assert the jail's policy and the plaintiffs' detention were violations of their Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.  

In certifying the class, Brown wrote the county had argued the plaintiffs' individual circumstances were not suited for class status because they “had different criminal backgrounds, were housed for different periods of time and had disparate charges.”

But, he said, “the plaintiffs allege that they were all intentionally detained for the same reason and by the same event: Defendants' decision to detain inmates eligible for release during the  November 2014 outage simply because they wanted to run GCIC checks, and the GCIC system was down.”

Those “individual facts may be relevant for a bond determination,” Brown wrote. “But, once bond is granted and posted, those considerations are irrelevant. Put another way, once a judge decides an inmate is eligible for release (and any conditions, such as the posting of a bond, are met), the jail is obligated to release the inmate without any 'reasonableness' determination by the jail.”

The county had also argued that the varying damages allegedly suffered by each class member should mitigate against class status.

“Our proposal was to do a per-day amount for each plaintiff, but the judge wants a more nuanced approach,” Begnaud said.

Brown wrote that, while setting a fixed amount of damages for each claimant “might minimize individual damages questions, it may not adequately account for each class member's damages. The court does not believe plaintiffs can simply conjure up a rule to avoid the potential difficulties in quantifying each class member's damages.”

“At this stage,” he wrote, “the court finds that the tools available to it in determining class members' damages would be adequate” to calculating those damages.

Begnaud said that Adger had testified during a deposition that there had been at least three other instances of the GCIC system going down, although none were for more than a couple of days.    

No litigation concerning those outages has been filed, he said.