N.Y. / REGION

Former Rikers Inmate Who Received Settlement Is Fatally Shot in Brooklyn

By 
Robert Hinton, a former Rikers Island inmate who was awarded $450,000 in September to settle a lawsuit over a severe beating by prison guards in 2012. He had hoped to buy a house. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times 
For Robert Hinton, 2015 was supposed to be a year of new beginnings. In March, he was released from prison after serving time for a parole violation. In September, he was awarded $450,000 by New York City to settle a lawsuit against several jail guards who hogtied and severely beat him in 2012 while he was incarcerated at Rikers Island.
In the months since the settlement, Mr. Hinton had been making plans to buy a house someplace far from his Brooklyn neighborhood, where he could not seem to stay out of trouble.
In the end, he could not escape.
Early on Friday morning, Mr. Hinton, 28, was shot and killed outside a housing project in Brownsville, Brooklyn, not far from his own home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, police officials said. No arrests had been made by Friday evening, and investigators provided no other details about the circumstances of the shooting.
Mr. Hinton had a history of violence as a member of the Bloods gang; he had served time for attempted murder and had been in and out of prison since 2005.
He had hoped that the settlement he had received would break that cycle. His lawyer, Nicole Bellina, said that when she spoke with him a few days ago he was upbeat about the future.
“We had a conversation about how hopeful he was, about how the settlement money was going to give him a chance for a fresh start,” she said.
Mr. Hinton’s beating was one of several recent cases that shed light on a culture of brutality and abuse of inmates at Rikers Island, and the subsequent outcry helped spur city officials to adopt sweeping changes there.
In his lawsuit, he described how in April 2012, five guards and a captain shackled his arms and legs, carried him into a solitary confinement cell and then beat him so savagely that he suffered a broken nose and a fractured vertebra.
Photos of Mr. Hinton — his face bloodied and bruised and his eyes swollen shut — circulated in the news media, including The New York Times. An administrative law judge described the beating as “brazen misconduct.” And in a rare move, the Correction Department chose to fire the guards involved.
Mr. Hinton had been moving on with his life, spending much of his time taking care of his mother at the home they shared in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ms. Bellina said. He had expressed a desire to move out of New York and buy a house, possibly in Yonkers, she said.
Recently, Ms. Bellina added, he sent her a text message that read, “I pray I even live long enough to see some sort of happiness.”