$75,000 for Pennsylvania Prisoner’s Excessive Force Claim Against Jail Guard
by Chuck Sharman
Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County Council voted on April 28, 2026, to pay $75,000 to Jerome Williamson, a former prisoner in the county lockup who accused a guard of shoving him to the floor and breaking his wrist.
The incident unfolded in September 2023 at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility (LCCF) in Wilkes-Barre, where Williamson, now 53, was serving a six-to-23-month sentence on a conviction for simple assault. According to the complaint he later filed, Williamson had been tapped by jailers to serve as a “monitor” for his housing unit at the LCCF. On September 25, he was monitoring the dayroom when guard Cpl. Nicholas Wilk entered and found food in the filter basket of the coffee maker. Williamson explained that detainees and prisoners sometimes used the machine as a food warmer. But Wilk said he was going to throw the food away. For reasons on which the complaint didn’t speculate, the guard then allegedly pushed Williamson to the floor.
Nurses at the jail confirmed the same day that his wrist was broken, but Williamson got no treatment except for a soft brace provided by a jail doctor about a week later. Three weeks after that, when he finally saw a specialist, Williamson learned that the wrist was not healing properly. But no other treatment was advised, leaving him to suffer continued pain in the wrist.
With the aid of attorneys Brian J. Zeigler and Laura Zipin of Levin & Zeiger LLP in Philadelphia, Williamson filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in February 2025. Proceeding under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, he accused Wilk of using excessive force in violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. He also sought to extend liability to the County for maintaining a de facto policy that gave rise to the constitutional violation by leaving the errant guard improperly trained and supervised, as provided under Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978).
The complaint further noted that Wilk had a documented history of violence, pointing to his 2017 conviction for simple assault after getting into a bar fight with two women and “shoving the bartender who tried to break up the fight.” The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement, and its payout included costs and fees for Plaintiff’s attorneys. See: Williamson v. Wilk, USDC (M.D. Pa.), Case No. 3:25-cv-00287.
On the same agenda as Williamson’s settlement was another $47,000 payout that County attorneys negotiated with Wilkes-Barre attorney Daniel J. Nawrocki, who represented another former detainee at the jail, Frank Lombardo. But he didn’t fare so well in his suit alleging that he was also subjected to excessive force by LCCF staff. As the local Citizen’s Voice reported, the County Council fell three votes short of approval when the Plaintiff’s brother, Council member John Lombardo, abstained, along with fellow Council member Joanna Bryn Smith—who earlier served as his defense counsel in a separate criminal matter—and a third abstention by Council member Steve Coslett, a guard at the jail who was involved in the incident with Lombardo. That left the settlement approval to die on a tie vote. See: Lombardo v. Cty. of Luzerne, USDC (M.D. Pa.), Case No. 1:23-cv-01225.
Additional source: Citizen’s Voice
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Related legal case
Lombardo v. Cty. of Luzerne
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (M.D. Pa.), Case No. 1:23-cv-01225 |
| Level | District Court |