A social worker falsely accused of giving contraband to an incarcerated client facing the death penalty has been paid $750,000 to end her federal lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Corrections investigator who arrested her.
Lily Engleman was cleared in 2021 of criminal charges alleging she gave items to inmate Ricky Dubose during a 2019 prison visit. She then sued GDC investigator Nathan Adkerson and other corrections staff, having been fired as a mitigation specialist in Georgia’s capital defender office due to her 2019 arrest.
Engleman has been working as a mitigation investigator with the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta since clearing her name in 2021, but says her arrest is something she’ll have to explain for the rest of her life. She told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her fight for justice has been emotionally draining, in part because of the guilt she feels over Dubose’s reported suicide in prison after she was taken off his case and he was sentenced to death in 2022.
“If this hadn’t happened to me and I had remained on his team and he did have a mitigation specialist, could the outcome have been different? Would he still be alive today?” Engleman said Thursday. “I still have a lot of pain about how all of that went down.”
Engleman worked with Dubose regarding his mental health, investigating whether trauma or addiction intersected with his criminal activity and could be considered as part of his prosecution. She said he didn’t have a mitigation specialist for more than a year after she was arrested and fired.
Engleman said she received an apology from Adkerson as part of the settlement, and that he acknowledged after years of litigation that a video recording of her visit with Dubose did not show her passing contraband. The footage, which the GDC released a year after Engleman’s arrest, prompted prosecutors to drop the felony charges against her.
Adkerson never explained what he accused Engleman of giving Dubose, she said. In his affidavit supporting Engleman’s arrest, Adkerson said she gave Dubose “two small unknown items” which Dubose then hid in his socks.
“It took many years before Nathan Adkerson himself admitted that the video didn’t show anything. I felt like he just ground his heels in,” Engleman said. “The judge found that he maliciously lied about evidence.”
Adkerson’s attorneys did not immediately respond to questions. A GDC representative said it was not involved in the settlement.
In a March order, U.S. District Judge Michael L. Brown said Adkerson’s “mischaracterization” of the video was hard to understand and that his claim that he sincerely, or at worst mistakenly, believed Engleman gave Dubose contraband was “totally at odds with the content of the video.” Brown allowed Engleman’s malicious prosecution claim against Adkerson to advance to trial, while tossing her other claims.
The settlement was tentatively agreed to in June and has just been finalized.
Engleman said she was paid the $750,000 through the state’s insurance coverage. Her attorney, Mark Begnaud, said the GDC took steps to ensure that attorney-client meetings at prison facilities were not being recorded, after it became aware that such recording was occurring.
“In Lily’s case, she and her client were unaware that they were being recorded in violation of attorney-client privilege,” Begnaud told the AJC.
Begnaud said Adkerson had presented other false evidence and withheld exonerating evidence in order to secure Engleman’s arrest, in what was “a terrifying abuse of power.”
Engleman said she hopes her case results in law enforcement agencies and professionals showing criminal defense workers respect. She said her arrest was an attack on the criminal defense profession, and that her lawsuit was aimed in part to prevent the unlawful prosecution of others in the field.
“I’m not the first member of a criminal defense team who has been arrested for fraudulent reasons and I would love to be the last,” she said. “You may not like the work that we’re doing, but we’re constitutionally mandated to try to enforce someone’s rights. We need to be allowed to do our job.”
