Forty correction officers are suing the city, charging that they were kept under virtual house arrest after being injured — often in the line of duty.
The officers, each seeking millions of dollars in damages, claim they were forced to remain at home 20 hours a day, seven days a week, while on paid sick leave for as long as two years.
“I felt like I was a prisoner. It was as if I committed a crime by getting hurt. The only thing I was missing was the electronic device around my ankle,” said Harvey Ball, who retired on disability in 1997, a year after he was injured in a struggle with an inmate.
Correction Department officials say their policy is necessary and fair, considering that prison guards enjoy the almost unheard-of benefit of unlimited sick leave with full pay.
“The department is not denying that right,” said Correction spokesman Tom Antenen. “But the department has the responsibility for managing that benefit.”
Under department rules, correction officers can be out sick for eight days with no restrictions. After that, they are permitted to leave their homes only between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. — a policy enforced by the department through home visits and phone calls.
But the officers charge the city tries to harass them into returning to work to cut down on overtime bills at Rikers Island.
For example:
*Ball, 47, said that when his brother had a heart attack and died in his arms in their Brooklyn apartment, he was given a five-day reprieve from the sick-leave restriction.
“After I buried my brother, I asked to move to a relative’s home for a while, I was under so much stress. But they refused. They made me sit there in that apartment seven days a week, month after month,” said Ball.
*Gary Nardiello suffered two herniated disks after slipping on a cellblock stairwell in 1994. For the next two years, he was allowed to leave his home only from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
“My wife went into labor with my daughter at 7 in the morning, but I couldn’t leave the house. I had to wait and call in to log out,” he said of the process for getting special permission to leave home.
When he returned from the hospital the next morning, Nardiello said, he found a memo from a correction captain under his door, suspending him without pay because he wasn’t home.
“An inmate has more hours out of his cell than I had out of my house,” fumed Nardiello, 39.
While on sick leave for the two years, Nardiello said he wasn’t allowed out at night. He couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner on her birthday.
Several months after he was fired under “medical separation” in May 1996, Nardiello’s wife died delivering triplets.
“I’ll never have that time back with my wife. How can they even compensate me for that?” he asked.
Steven Morelli and Leonard Leeds, lawyers for the 40 correction officers, said the suit is aimed at changing the department’s policy and getting fair compensation for past suffering.
Antenen said about 300 of the city’s 11,000 correction officers are on indefinite sick leave of a month or more.
“Within that 300 are a lot of legitimate illnesses,” said Antenen. “But there are about 100 out who are manipulating the system.”
Ball and another officer first filed a federal suit in 1995, represented by their union, the Correction Officers Benevolent Association.
But in 1998, a U.S. District Court tossed out their request for monetary compensation after their union agreed to drop the damage suit in exchange for other concessions, including the eight-day period of unrestricted sick leave.
The officers — now joined by 38 others — are now appealing the first decision, represented by their own lawyers instead of union attorneys.
As for the current policy, union President Norman Seabrook said he will try to negotiate further changes when contract talks begin next year.
“It’s not fair. They don’t make the mayor stay in when he’s sick,” quipped Seabrook.