Category: Verdicts and Settlements

Jury Award for Excessive Force Upheld by U.S. Court of Appeals

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a jury award of $445,000 for a man who was brutalized by three members of the NYPD. It is an important decision for several reasons, not the least of which was the Court’s recognition that deliberate attempts by officers to cover up and hide their misconduct can be taken into account by jurors in determining how much they should award in punitive damages.

Andrew Yurkiw, Amber Lagrandier, and Joseph Solomito assaulted our client, Thomas Jennings, breaking his nose in multiple places. The case was first tried in Brooklyn federal court in June 2018. That jury, outraged by these officers’ conduct and their attempt to lie their way past the trial, awarded plaintiff $500,000 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages. The Court ruled that those amounts were too high and gave plaintiff the option of accepting $255,000 as a final number (of which $140,000 was for punitive damages) or having a second jury decide how much he should receive.

We elected to retry the case and proceeded to trial in April 2019. This time the jury awarded a total amount of $445,000, including $355,000 in punitive damages. This time the court left the award alone. The three officers appealed, arguing that the Court should have again reduced the punitive damages to $140,000. The defendants argued their brutality was nothing but “a few minutes of violence” against Jennings. The appellate court rejected that argument, finding that “’a few minutes of violence’ is not a trivial matter.” The Court also pointed out that the defendants’ “excessive force was made the more reprehensible because none of the officers intervened to stop the attack, as each was required to do” and that “[t]he reprehensible nature of the officers’ conduct is underscored by the elaborate steps they took to cover up their misconduct. The jury heard and was entitled to consider a record that included falsified charging documents, false accounts of the beating, faked or exaggerated injury, and perjured trial testimony.”

Jennings was represented throughout the case by Amy Rameau. Michael Lumer tried both cases with Ms. Rameau and participated on the appeal with appellate counsel Scott Korenbaum.



Trial Verdict for False Arrest and Malicious Prosecution

We are pleased to announce that our client TM recently obtained a jury verdict following atrial in federal court in Manhattan in December 2019, leading to a final award of $260,000. The defendant officers, including detectives Jeremy Ramos and Shelby Jones, claimed they personally witnessed TM participate in a drug sale, and they and members of their narcotics team, wrongly arrested plaintiff and caused him to be criminally prosecuted. He was later acquitted at his criminal trial.

These criminal charges were fundamentally false, as plaintiff was not present at, and had no involvement in, the drug transaction, as the officers fully understood. We then helped TM sue the officers responsible. The jury in the civil case agreed with plaintiff, finding specifically that he was not involved in the drug sale, and that he was wrongly arrested, maliciously prosecuted, and denied his right to a fair trial. The jury awarded TM $40,000 in compensatory damages, and an additional $30,000 in punitive damages, which were assessed against detectives Ramos and Jones.

In January 2020, the City of New York agreed to pay plaintiff $85,000 (which is $15,000 more than what the jury had originally awarded him), as well as $175,000 more to cover his legal fees and costs to fully resolve the action.

$120k Trial Verdict

LLG just obtained a substantial verdict for our client, TH, following a jury trial in a Brooklyn federal court on TH’s civil rights claims. TH was wrongly arrested during a search warrant execution on Valentine’s Day in 2015. He was jailed for five days and then brought to court, where prosecutors promptly dismissed all charged.

The arresting detective, Essence Jackson, provided a fundamentally falsified version of events to prosecutors to justify TH’s arrest. The jury rejected Jackson’s trial testimony, which was directly contradicted by his own partner, and, on October 30, awarded plaintiff $90k in compensatory damages for his false arrest and denial of fair trial claims, as well as $30k in punitive damages against Detective Jackson. The defendant is also liable for all of TH’s legal fees, the amount of which will be determined by the court.

Michael Lumer was co-counsel for TH at trial with Robert Marinelli, Esq.

$200,000 Settlement in Shooting Case

In July 2015, NYPD Sgt. Joseph Alohan attempted to apprehend our unarmed client, AW, for stealing rims from a parked car. When AW fled, Alohan decided to shoot him. The bullet went through the AW’s forearm as he was running away from Alohan, who later falsely claimed that AW had charged at him with a knife. A jury flatly rejected that claim. Earlier this month LLG settled AW’s excessive force case against Alohan and the City of New York for $200,000.