Pubdate: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 Source: Orange County Register (CA) Contact: http://www.ocregister.com/ Copyright: 1998 The Orange County Register Author: Kim Christensen-OCR 'VERY SWEET,' INMATE'S DAD SAYS OF DEAL Law: The $250,000 settlement springs from the shooting of his unarmed son by a Corcoran guard. The father of a Corcoran State Prison inmate shot to death in 1994 said Wednesday that he's satisfied with an $825,000 settlement of his civil-rights lawsuit but is looking forward to the criminal trial of the guard who killed his son. "It's very sweet," Bill Tate, 48, said of the settlement, which was reached Tuesday. "But we have a long way to go as far as the criminal trial goes." Preston Tate, 25, was shot to death April 2, 1994, during a fight in an exercise yard at the maximum-security prison in Kings County. It was one of 27 fatal shootings of unarmed inmates examined by The Orange County Register in a 1994 investigative series. The series revealed the California prison guards with high-powered rifles had killed more inmates in a five-year period than were killed by all other state and federal prison guards combined. None of the slain inmates had posed a direct threat to correctional officers, and only one was trying to escape, the Register found. A federal grand jury investigation of the Tate shooting and others at Corcoran resulted in the indictment in February of eight correctional officers and supervisors on charges that they violated the inmates' civil rights. Federal investigators also accused state officials of trying to "stymie, delay and obstruct" their investigation. Those awaiting trial include the guard who killed Tate, a convicted rapist, during one of a series of fights allegedly staged by correctional officers in 1994 as "blood sport" contests. Moments before Tate was shot, one of the guards allegedly said it was about to be "duck-hunting season" on the exercise yard. A veteran correctional officer told the Register at the time that it was "a bad shoot." The elder Tate, a mental-health worker from San Gabriel, said he felt vindicated by the settlement, the largest ever paid by the Department of Corrections in a shooting case and the first to arise from the allegations that led to the indictments earlier this year. - ---