Remember Alex Wubbels? She was the nurse at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City forcefully detained in July of last year by police officer Detective Jeff Payne for refusing to draw a sedated patient’s blood in connection with a police investigation. Her arrest was captured on body camera video and widely distributed.

Nurse Wubbels was following hospital policy, and no charges were filed against her.

University of Utah Health now bars police officers from patient-care areas. Officer Payne was fired from his job with police, and from part-time work as a paramedic. Nurse Wubbels accepted a settlement of $500,000, split between the city and the hospital. Her lawyer declined to explain why they agreed to settle.

How about Nandi Cain Jr.? He was the black man beaten by a Sacramento, California, white police officer on April 10 of last year as he was walking home from work in the afternoon. Officer Anthony Figueroa accused Cain of jaywalking, but Nandi questioned the validity of the stop.

The incident was picked up on the cruiser’s dashboard camera, and a cellphone video shot by a passenger in a car when the driver stopped to record what was happening. The passenger and driver both got out of the car and screamed their objections to the assault.

In the end, at least seven police officers could be seen in the video, Cain was searched, accused of jaywalking, and charged with resisting arrest. He claimed he was stripped naked and verbally abused at the Sacramento County Jail. The charge was dropped and he was released within hours.

Nandi Cain filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police. The portion of the suit pertaining to his treatment while in custody was settled last fall for an undisclosed amount, and the balance of the action was resolved by a $550,000 cash settlement this spring, plus changes to police policy.

Yes, non-disclosure clauses are not as frequent in the United States as in Canada, where we have less accountability attached to use of tax dollars, and settlements in the U.S. are customarily higher as well. The figures above are in American dollars, too.

Brennan Guigue filed a claim through his legal representatives on July 24, 2017, in Quebec Superior Court against the Attorney General of Canada, and Eric Charbonneau, a guard at the Quebec Regional Reception Centre. He’s asking for $220,000 in damages relating to the incident on July 22, 2014 where he was “tortured and abused by Canada’s own federal civil servants”, as we wrote on March 4 of this year.

Complete videos of the incident were finally turned over to his lawyers at the end of this February. Still to come are redacted portions of Correctional Service of Canada documents which, even in their present edited state, repeatedly underscore that the actions taken on July 22 of 2014 were unwarranted. A full medical file has also been requested.

Counsel Véronique Forest from Canada’s ministry of justice is representing the government. She’s answered the Guigue claim with an argument that can be précised as a declaration that nothing was amiss in 2014, the defendants are not liable, and the plaintiff is responsible for what happened.

One might assume she hasn’t seen the videos and hasn’t read the documentation. We’d be tempted to counter by suggesting the film be posted for her benefit, but that would raise objections from some quarters.

In the meantime, both parties supported a delay in the proceedings until this September in order to ready the file for trial.

As we wrote in March, “The wheels turn…….”