[A] former Vermont State Police trooper has settled for more than half a million dollars in the case of a Bosnian War survivor who says that she began experiencing PTSD after being wrongfully arrested following a traffic stop.
The settlement was reached about a month before a two-week trial in the case was set to begin at the federal court in Burlington.
Fata Sakoc, a Bosnian immigrant, filed the lawsuit against trooper Timothy Carlson after being pulled over in March 2010 in Essex while driving home from her shift at a nursing home. She accused him of violating her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures.
According to court documents, Carlson asked Sakoc to perform a field sobriety test in which she showed no signs of being intoxicated and then proceeded to give her a breath test that showed she had no alcohol in her system. He still arrested her for suspicion of driving while impaired by drugs.
Carlson then brought Sakoc to a police station and then a hospital, where she submitted to a blood test that again showed no alcohol and no drugs in her system, court records say. The citation for driving while impaired was dropped.
Brooks McArthur, an attorney who represented Sakoc, said he believed that Carlson arrested his client because he needed to process someone for drunk driving in order to advance in his police training.
“There was no basis to arrest her other than the officer having a desire to meet that element of his training,” McArthur said in an interview Monday.
Sakoc immigrated to Vermont in the early 2000s with her husband, who has been accused of concealing crimes allegedly committed during the Bosnian War. McArthur said her career as a nursing assistant was derailed by the incident with Carlson, which sparked psychological problems that made her unable to work.
“She had some awful experiences while living in Bosnia during the Bosnian War,” McArthur said. “While he [Carlson] was not responsible for her experiences in the Bosnian War, she did not have symptoms of PTSD before the arrest.”
Those symptoms first began to surface soon after the arrest, he said. “It was a trigger event. Unfortunately, this was the wrong person to stop and arrest,” McArthur said.
A spokesperson for the Vermont State Police referred questions about the case to the state Office of the Attorney General. David Maclean, an attorney for AG’s office who represented Carlson, said there was no evidence to support the claim that his arrest of Sakoc was in any way related to concerns over career advancement.
“It was a unique set of circumstances and a unique case in respect to her response to the traffic stop,” he said, adding that Carlson had remained respectful of Sakoc and followed procedure throughout the process.
Maclean said the settlement was in no way an admission of wrongdoing, and that the state and its insurance carrier had simply decided that after years of litigation the costs and risks of continuing to trial were too great.
“There are always risks in a jury trial. No matter how strong our case is, there’s always the possibility of it being an unfavorable judgement against us,” Maclean said.
He said the state and its insurance carrier would be paying the settlement. Carlson left the police force in 2013 for personal reasons, Maclean said.
The settlement was reached following following years of legal wrangling. The lawsuit filed in federal court prompted a motion to dismiss from the AG’s office on the basis of qualified immunity, which protects officer from lawsuits for reasonable decisions made in the line of duty.
That motion was initially rejected, but then, following additional discovery, the AG’s office filed the same motion and it was upheld. Sakoc appealed that ruling to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found in her favor, sending the case to trial.
Based on a review of a video of the arrest, a transcript of the audio and all available evidence, circuit court judges concluded that “no reasonable officer could have found arguable probable cause to arrest Sakoc…solely based the video and accompanying audio of the field sobriety tests.”
McArthur said he believed the settlement represented the largest such sum in a federal wrongful arrest case in Vermont history.
Since the lawsuit was filed, Edin Sakoc, Fata’s husband, agreed to leave the United States as part of a plea deal for lying to immigration officers about what he said were legitimate wartime actions, according to a Seven Days report.
Fata remained in the country after her husband left, McArthur said. In a letter submitted to the court during her husband’s trial, she wrote that Edin took care of their young daughter at their Burlington home while she “worked very hard at several jobs,” according to Seven Days.
Editors note: This story has been updated with comments from David Maclean.
