Brooklyn Man Wins $750K Settlement After Six-Day Erection Left Him Impotent
A former Manhattan Detention Complex detainee was left impotent after medical personnel failed to quell his six-day bout with a painful erection, and has now won a $750,000 settlement from the city for his troubles, DNAinfo reports.
Rodney Cotton had an adverse reaction to his anti-psychotic medication, Risperdal, which resulted in priapism, a medical condition characterized by persistent erections that last longer than four hours. Cotton first contacted medical staff at the jail on July 4th, 2011, when his erection first appeared, but says doctors were negligent.
Cotton’s lawsuit, filed in August of 2011 for an original sum of $10 million, alleged that the inmate “made numerous complaints of a priapism condition, for which inadequate care and attention was provided by the infirmary on premises,” according to the New York Daily News.
Cotton claims that Dr. Craig Metroka, the first physician he was permitted to see, prescribed him an ice pack and Tylenol before promptly dismissing the inmate back to his cell in the jail’s solitary unit.
It was in that cell where Cotton sat writhing in pain for six days until he was rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery, DNAinfo reports. The surgical procedure, however, left him completely impotent, Cotton claims.
“They took my manhood!” he told the News. “It’s embarrassing. We’re here to create. I can’t perform my duties as a man.”
The Manhattan Detention Complex doctors were employed by Corizon, a New York based health non-profit which staffs city jails with medical personnel.
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