A jury last week awarded nearly $2 million to a former California prison psychiatrist who claimed the state retaliated against him when officials began raising questions about how he earned high incomes from two government agencies.
A decade ago, Anthony Coppola held a senior position at a former state prison in Tracy and a part-time assignment as a psychiatrist at Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail.
He also kept a massive bank of unused personal leave from his state job, totaling over 1,000 hours. Court records show he took two personal days a week to draw down that balance and used the time to work for Alameda County.
It added up to a combined income of about $550,000 a year , with about $300,000 from the state and about $250,000 from the county, according to public records at the website Transparent California .
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation opened an internal investigation into whether he was misusing leave — “double-dipping,” as one official put it — and that contributed to a chain of events that Coppola argued drove him into early retirement.