A federal jury has awarded $100,000 to a Kentucky couple who sued former county clerk Kim Davis over her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Davis, the former Rowan County clerk, drew international attention when she was briefly jailed in 2015 over her refusal, which she based on her belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
A jury in Ashland, Kentucky, awarded David Ermold and David Moore each $50,000 after deliberating on Wednesday, according to lawyers for Davis. A second couple who sued, James Yates and Will Smith, were awarded no damages on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge David Bunning.
Last year, a federal judge ruled that Davis violated the constitutional rights of the two gay couples who sued her.
US district judge David Bunning said that Davis “cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official”.
Davis’s defense team said in a Wednesday press release that they “look forward to appealing this decision and taking this case to the US supreme court”. But the US supreme court already declined to hear an appeal from Davis’s lawyers on the matter in 2020, AP reported.
The saga began in 2015 after the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states with the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Davis declared that issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples went against her beliefs as a member of the Apostolic Church that marriage should only be between one man and one woman.
Eventually a deputy clerk approved the two couples’ requests for marriage licenses, and Davis went to jail for five days for contempt of court. She was later defeated in her bid for reelection — a race that briefly saw Ermold vie for the position.
