'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.