A federal judge has awarded Ashley Overbey Underwood damages she won from a brutality settlement six years ago against the Baltimore Police Department – funds that were then withheld because the city said she violated a non-disclosure agreement by responding to comments about her case on a newspaper blog.

The city had withheld half of Underwood’s $63,000 settlement, but the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland sued on her behalf, challenging the use of so-called “gag” orders to settle police misconduct suits.

After years of legal wrangling, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that using non-disclosure agreements to silence plaintiffs was an unenforceable violation of their constitutional rights, describing the payments as “hush money.”

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE