The Boston police officer who was suspended last week for describing Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” in an email to a local newspaper is suing the Boston Police Department and the city’s mayor for infringing on his civil rights and causing him — among other things — “emotional distress” and “post-traumatic stress.”
According to a report in the Boston Globe, Justin Barrett’s lawsuit accuses the city and the police department of “conspiring to intentionally inflict emotional distress and conspiring to intentionally interfere with the property rights, due process rights, and civil rights of the plaintiff.’’
The lawsuit says Boston’s mayor and police chief caused Barrett “pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional distress, post-traumatic stress, sleeplessness, indignities and embarrassment, degradation, injury to reputation, and restrictions on personal freedom.”
Boston Mayor Tom Menino called Barrett a “cancer” that “doesn’t have any place in the department” after it was revealed Barrett had sent a letter to the Boston Globe criticizing the paper’s coverage of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last month.
