PALMER -- A civil jury took less than an hour Friday afternoon to find that the Alaska Department of Corrections was not negligent when a former maximum-security prison inmate was assaulted in 2007.
Richard Mattox blames the state for not letting him move out of a rowdy housing unit before another inmate punched him in the face.
The state does not expect an appeal from the former Spring Creek Correctional Center inmate, corrections department spokeswoman Sherrie Daigle said Monday.
"We believe that the jury coming back in 45 minutes or less lends itself to show that we had a very solid case," Daigle said.
But Mattox's Palmer-based lawyer, Ben Whipple, said Monday that it was too early to tell what decision his client would make in light of the verdict.
Mattox, now 54, lives on the Kenai Peninsula and receives disability payments stemming from an old back injury.
The lawsuit he filed in 2009 centered on the 2007 attack by inmate Vince Wilkerson that came while the men watched television together. The punch broke five bones in his face, Whipple said during the weeklong trial held in Palmer Superior Court. A Palmer judge rejected Mattox's claims in 2011, but the Alaska Supreme Court last year ordered the case back to the lower court, saying the state had a duty to protect prisoners from "all reasonably foreseeable harm."
During last week's trial, Mattox was the only witness to testify on his own behalf. He said he asked several times to leave his housing unit after his roommate made what he described as racially charged threats. The assault occurred after those requests were made. Wilkerson was never criminally charged.
Susan West, the assistant attorney general arguing the case for the corrections department, said Mattox failed to give prison officials any specifics about threats to his personal safety when he asked to move.