South Carolina officials gave initial approval Tuesday to a $6 million settlement to resolve dozens of prisoner lawsuits against the Department of Corrections following a riot that killed seven inmates.
With one abstention due to a conflict of interest, the State Fiscal Accountability Authority voted unanimously to approve the deal, which it said would work toward resolving a total of 81 lawsuits filed by or for inmates in state and federal courts against the prison system.
The 2018 riot raged for more than seven hours at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Columbia. Most of the slain were stabbed or slashed; others appeared to have been beaten. One inmate described bodies “literally stacked on top of each other, like some macabre woodpile.”
