District Attorney Vern Pierson said that Phillip Garrido should have remained imprisoned after his 1976 crimes, and that what he did had taken an eleven-year-old’s childhood and innocence.
Phillip Garrido received 431 years to life—the maximum sentence available. Nancy Garrido received 36 years to life, with parole eligibility in August 2029.
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## The Civil Proceedings
The criminal sentences addressed what the Garridos had done. But Dugard’s attorneys also pursued civil claims that addressed the institutional failures that had allowed the captivity to persist for eighteen years.
California approved a $20 million settlement with Jaycee Dugard in 2010. The settlement reflected the state’s acknowledgment of the parole supervision failures documented in the Inspector General’s report—the decades of inadequate monitoring, the missed home visits, the ignored GPS alerts, the unreviewed neighbors, the failure to obtain the federal parole file. The state did not contest its liability in those proceedings.
The federal government was a separate matter. The federal parole system had also supervised Garrido before California took over, and the question of whether the federal government could be held responsible for the abduction presented different legal standards. Dugard filed a federal lawsuit. In 2016, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the claim in a 2-1 ruling. The majority opinion stated that “there was no way to anticipate she would become his victim”—reasoning that the federal government’s supervision had not been sufficiently connected to the specific harm she suffered to create legal liability under the relevant federal statutes.
The dissenting judge in that 2-1 ruling disagreed with the majority’s analysis. Dugard’s attorneys sought an en banc review by a larger panel of judges. The federal case ultimately did not succeed.