Last year, 22-year-old Darrien Hunt was shot and killed by Utah police. Now, his mother has rejected a settlement in her lawsuit against the city that would have barred her from speaking publicly about her son’s death.
“To me it was a gag order [that said], ‘Here’s hush money, don’t ever say Darrien’s name again,'” Susan Hunt, mother of Darrien, told Utah’s KSL news.
Susan Hunt would be received $900,000 if she had taken the settlement, and it’s a practice that has become increasingly popular lately, with payouts for settlements in cases like these soaring to new highs since 2010 as cities and police officials receive more and more complaints about police brutality.
Although many, like Hunt, believe that the settlements are akin to “hush money” and are a way to make accusations go away, cities have long defended the practice, saying that it would be impractical to litigate in every single one of these cases and that it would actually cost the cities more to go to court than to settle out of it.
“The idea is to resolve the case through a compromise, stop any pending legal proceedings in their tracks, and put the incident behind everyone,” Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University, told The Huffington Post.
In the meantime, Hunt’s case is moving forward without the settlement, and the U.S. Department of Justice is looking into it as well.