A civil court judge in Maine has ordered two white men to pay $1.2 million in damages more than five years after they smashed a Black man’s jaw in a vicious and racially motivated attack.
Superior Court Judge Richard Mulhern handed down the civil judgment Thursday after the men responsible for the attack, Maurice Diggins and his nephew Dusty Leo, missed a pretrial deadline to submit arguments and discovery evidence.
Both have been incarcerated since they were convicted in 2020 on federal hate crime charges, while neither man had obtained an attorney to argue for them in civil court.
The latest judgment comes more than a year after the victim, Daimon McCollum, filed for damages in civil court to force the assailants to cover medical expenses stemming from the assault.
At the time, Diggins and Leo filed handwritten responses to the lawsuit, arguing they couldn’t afford to pay damages to McCollum or a lawyer. Diggins said his commissary account was frozen because of the $15,000 he was ordered to pay in fines and restitution during the criminal trial, which he also could not afford.
“Your Honor, I have no means to pay Mr. McCollum if judgment is made in favor of Mr. McCollum,” Diggins wrote.
They also asked for additional time to lawyer up in the matter, which the judge denied in his ruling on Thursday, in which Mulhern ordered them to pay $700,000 in punitive damages and $500,000 in compensatory damages on top of the restitution they were ordered to pay upon their convictions three years ago.
The Feb. 25, 2018, attack on McCollum outside a gas station happened around 1 a.m. and was preceded by a separate unprovoked assault on a Sudanese man outside a bar in Portland, according to the federal indictment.
After beating up the victim in Portland, the men drove 20 miles to their hometown of Biddeford, where they encountered McCollum outside a 7-Eleven store.
Ahead of the confrontation, Diggins and Leo hurled racial slurs…
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