Lawyers are Finding Rewarding Work in Police Brutality
Cases, and also Money
cash
with a conscience
by Daniel Rivero
September 01, 2015 7 a.m.
About two and a half years ago, Chicago
attorney Antonio Romanucci took note of a pattern in the news: national media
outlets seemed to be covering more cases of alleged police misconduct.
It was 2013, and the cases were as shocking as
they are today. A Miami teenager was killed by a Taser after police found him
tagging an abandoned McDonald’s building. Three high school teens in Rochester,
NY were arrested on a street corner for “obstruction” of a sidewalk while they
waited for a school bus to take them to a basketball game. A man was given
multiple enemas and forced to undergo a colonoscopy in a hospital after
refusing to allow police to search his anus for drugs during a routine traffic
stop. No drugs were ever found.
“So I thought: ‘Why not put together a group of
lawyers who practice in this area?’” said Romanucci, who had long worked on
police misconduct cases. “We can network and collaborate and strengthen the
cases that we have against the municipalities and police departments where the
police misconduct occurs.”
Shortly after, he founded a working group
within the National
Bar Association, the nation’s largest association of mostly black
lawyers and judges, with a focus on police misconduct cases. The group will
celebrate its second anniversary this month, at a time when more lawyers are
being drawn to a field where there’s justice to be served, money to be made,
and unfortunately, plenty of work.
“We have probably close to 80 members already,
and that number keeps growing,” said Romanucci. “I actually have five
applications to join us sitting on my desk right now.”
The Numbers
Add Up
As far as business decisions go, the numbers
were ripe for lawyers to start paying more attention to the field. Over the
last ten years, Chicago has paid out over half a billion dollars in police
misconduct settlements. New York City almost matched that amount between 2009
and 2014 alone. As a whole, the ten cities with the largest police departments
paid out a total of $1.02 billion in police-misconduct cases over the last five
years, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal.
“That’s $300 million in legal fees. And the
police are feeding you new cases every day,” an attorney speaking at the
National Bar Association’s annual conference told attendees in July, citing
similar settlement numbers. “So it’s a great avenue to make money.”
Potential windfalls vary. In Maryland, for
example, there’s a $200,000 cap on the money a municipality can pay out in
these cases, barring certain exceptions. As a result, even though “over 100”
people have won police-misconduct cases against the Baltimore police department
over the last few years, the Baltimore Sun reported that only $5.7 million had
been paid out to the victims of those cases.
In contrast, New York City reached a $5.9
million settlement with the the estate of Eric Garner in July, totaling more
than all the Baltimore cases combined between 2011 and late 2014. In Chicago
earlier this year, the city agreed to a $5 million settlement for the death of
LaQuan McDonald, a teenager who died after being shot by an officer a total of
16 times. In Los Angeles, the city recently paid a $5 million settlement to the
family of a veteran who was shot and killed by an officer on live television,
following a car chase.
It Helps If
There’s a Video, and That’s Happening More Often
All of the specific incidents mentioned above
were caught on video — a factor that contributes to more lawyers looking at
police-involved cases, Romanucci said.
“Those videos then get turned over to the
media, which then publicizes them,” he said. “So as a result, with video
evidence you have a much bigger chance at either proving or disproving a case
of police misconduct.”
It also means attorneys are increasingly able
to “weed out the bad cases” and spend more time with the ones that legitimately
deserve justice.
The rise in civilian recordings of police
interactions “will cause many more cases to settle earlier,” he said, but it will
also “disprove many people’s cases when they come in and say they were a victim
of something, and the video doesn’t line up with their story.”
Video footage, like in the case of Sam DuBose,
can help strengthen cases, Romanucci said.
Yet even with video evidence, which might make
a case look cut and dry to the casual observer, the cases are not slam dunks.
They still take a lot of work, Romanucci stressed, adding that some of the
personal injury attorneys entering into the field aren’t used to the heavy
casework of civil rights law.
“I’ve taken as many as 60 depositions for one
case — you’re talking about 60 separate interviews,” he said.
“It’s a more specialized field than just your
normal personal injury law, because you’re dealing with violations to the
constitution, and these cases tend to be in federal court,” Dallas-area
attorney Daryl Washington, who also specializes in police misconduct cases,
told Fusion. “They’re very detailed cases.”
An additional burden in bringing these cases to
court, Washington added, was the close relationship that many district
attorneys have with the police departments they are sometimes charged with
investigating. “Think about it: In the vast majority of cases, the district
attorney’s primary witness is a police officer,” he said. “It would truly help
out the process if you had an independent investigator and a special prosecutor
to handle these cases.”
Even Lawyers
Want to Do the Right Thing
Lawyers aren’t the only ones calling for states
to appoint special prosecutors in cases where police have been involved in the
death of a civilian. Activists have done so, too. In July, thanks in part to
those demands, New York became the first state to do appoint one.
Doing good attracts many people into the field,
group founder Romanucci said, as well the potential for a good payday at the
end of a successful case. Many of these cases’ lawyers’ fees are paid by the
municipalities after a victory, he clarified, and many of them are also based
on the contingency method, where an attorney is paid by the funds received only
if the money is won.
“The profession is reacting very, very
cautiously to the growing attention [to cases of police misconduct], but also
with a very open eye,” he said.
“Because at the end of the day if you’re doing
this work, you want to do the right thing, and you want to help make our laws a
little better,” he said.
And the money doesn’t hurt, either.
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