DeShawn Drumgo accused Sergeant William Kuschel in a lawsuit of touching him inappropriately during a pat down as other prison staff and inmates watched, and then he squeezed Drumgo’s genitals so hard that his skin ruptured. The other guards laughed and failed to intervene during the assault, he said.

The jury in the two-day trial found that Kuschel violated Drumgo’s Eighth Amendment rights during the pat down, but also said that the inmate did not prove that he was injured amid the encounter. Drumgo was awarded $1 in nominal damages, while Kuschel was ordered to pay the $500,000 in punitive damages.

A federal appeals court last year overturned an earlier ruling from a district court judge who granted Kuschel summary judgment, or a ruling that is issued without a full trial for a case in which one party asserts there are no important facts in dispute, according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.

The district judge said that Drumgo did not present sufficient evidence to support his claims that Kuschel breached his constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment.

But the panel ruled that the judge was wrong in granting summary judgment and saying that Drumgo did not provide adequate facts. The contrasting evidence between Drumgo and Kuschel warranted judgment by a jury rather than a judge, the panel said.

Other Department of Correction workers testified that the search was proper, and that they never heard Drumgo tell Kuschel to stop what he was doing, as other inmates had said.

Department of Correction officials had won a previous summary judgment ruling after arguing that Drumgo had failed to exhaust available administrative remedies before filing his lawsuit. They said there was no record in the prison database indicating that Drumgo had filed a grievance.

But after Drumgo successfully appealed that ruling, prison officials told the court a subsequent search found that Drumgo did file a grievance against Kuschel. Officials said the grievance was docketed in a separate database for confidentiality reasons because it involved allegations of sexual misconduct.

Drumgo was sentenced to 23 years in prison in 2007 after being convicted of second-degree murder in the 2006 stabbing death of another man at a Wilmington, Delaware, apartment complex.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.