California Pays $15,000 to State Prisoner Who Claimed He Was Targeted by Guards
by Chuck Sharman
In a document copied to PLN by California state prisoner Richard Carrasco, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) agreed on February 18, 2026, to pay $15,000 to settle claims that he was targeted for violence by guards at California State Prison in Los Angeles County (CSP-LAC).
Carrasco was still a teen when he committed a series of rapes that resulted in a 2003 life sentence. His pro se complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in January 2022, accused a CDCR guard identified as P. Delatore of targeting Carrasco in April 2019 by showing his central file—with a list of Carrasco’s convicted sex offenses—to a fellow prisoner who was a member of “STG II 25ers.”
“Look at this stuff!” Delatore told the unnamed “25er,” the complaint recalled. Later that day, Carrasco said, he overheard Delatore tell two other members of the gang that when they “hit” Carrasco, they should “hit him in the heart.”
Carrasco asked another guard named Lewis to place him in protective custody. Lewis not only refused but also reported the request to another prisoner, thereby “jacketing” Carrasco as a “snitch.” A third guard named Flores, to whom he then turned for help, rhetorically demanded of Carrasco, “Do you have a pussy between your legs?” She told him to “handle [his] own business,” and when reminded of her oath to protect him responded, “Fuck that! I don’t care!”
The next guard whom he asked for protection was one named Martinez-Espino, who handcuffed Carrasco and tossed him in an empty cell. There he remained for two days without food out of fear, he said. An unnamed mental health worker visited him at the cell, and Carrasco showed a homemade knife he had fashioned for self-protection. But the guard to whom the clinician relayed this information “disregarded” it.
Unsurprisingly, Carrasco was attacked the next day in the pill line by a fellow prisoner named Collins, whose throat he sliced in self-defense. Carrasco was placed in an isolation cell known as the “cage,” where the hapless mental health clinician visited to express remorse over the assault, telling the prisoner, “I tried to warn them…. I even notified the [Sergeant] that your life was in danger and you showed me a weapon. I’m sorry, I tried to help you.”
After filing his complaint, Carrasco was found guilty of assault and battery on Collins. Defendant CDCR officials then moved for summary judgment on his failure-to-protect claim, arguing that accepting Carrasco’s self-defense explanation would necessarily implicate the validity of his assault conviction, meaning his entire suit was barred under Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 77 (1994). Carrasco failed to meet several deadlines that the district court set for a response to the motion, which it then took up to consider on its merits.
Ruling on February 5, 2025, a magistrate recommended denying Defendants’ summary judgment motion. Heck operates to bar claims that necessarily implicate the validity of a prisoner’s conviction, the magistrate said. But that wasn’t the case here. “[I]f Plaintiff’s failure to protect claims were dependent on ‘a finding of self-defense[, such claims] would impermissibly negate his conviction,” the magistrate allowed. “However, Plaintiff’s failure to protect claims do not require a finding that Plaintiff acted in self-defense during his altercation with Collins.” Rather, “it is possible for two things to be true: Defendants may have violated their duty to protect Plaintiff and Plaintiff may have initiated an unjustified attack on Collins.”
In fact, the magistrate said, Carrasco sued the officials for disregarding the “threat of serious harm or injury,” not for the altercation with Collins. So his claim was not Heck barred. The district court adopted the magistrate’s report and recommendation and denied Defendants’ motion for summary judgment on April 8, 2025. See: Carrasco v. Delatorre, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21032 (C.D. Cal.); and 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 68904 (C.D. Cal.). The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement, which included the payout to Carrasco. See: Carrasco v. Delatorre, USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 2:22-cv-00720.
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Related legal case
Carrasco v. Delatorre
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (C.D. Cal.), Case No. 2:22-cv-00720 |
| Level | District Court |