The family of George Floyd received $27 million after he was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. The family of Breonna Taylor got $12 million. Richard Cox, who was paralyzed after a ride in a police van in New Haven, Conn., got $46 million.
But the family of Botham Shem Jean, who was killed by an off-duty officer, Amber R. Guyger, as he watched television in his apartment in Dallas in 2018, may never see a penny.
That is not because the courts did not value his life. On Tuesday, a jury awarded his family almost $100 million. The difference lies, rather, in who was held responsible for his death.
How do police violence cases usually work?
In many high-profile cases of police violence, the city or county where the misconduct occurred is responsible for any payout connected to wrongful death or injury. Those taxpayer-funded payouts have amounted to billions of dollars: In 2023, New York City paid nearly $115 million in police misconduct settlements, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society.
Awards to victims or their families can vary greatly, depending on factors such as the projected earnings over a victim’s lifetime, the sympathies of juries in a given jurisdiction and the amount of publicity generated by the case. Some families win money in civil rights claims even when the officers involved are not criminally charged or disciplined.
But in order to have a successful case, plaintiffs must surmount at least two significant legal obstacles. First, officers are granted qualified immunity from lawsuits if victims cannot show that the officers have violated their “clearly established” rights. Second, municipalities can be held responsible only if the plaintiff’s rights were violated because of a negligent policy or practice — for example, if the police department had ignored previous bad behavior on the part of an officer or had failed to properly train its officers.
The actions in question need not have happened while the officer was on duty, said Joseph Marrone, a civil rights lawyer based in Philadelphia. The plaintiff can show that the officer had warning signs that should have led to removal from active duty or kept the officer from being hired at all.
The Jean family argued that Ms. Guyger was effectively on duty when she shot Mr. Jean: She was in uniform, armed with her service weapon, issuing commands and responding to what she believed was a crime. But a judge dismissed the city from the case, leaving Ms. Guyger as the only defendant.
Who pays the victim or the victim’s family?
Large judgments and settlements in police misconduct cases are almost always paid by the city or county or its insurer. The money rarely comes out of the law enforcement budget, according to research by Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles.
In one wrongful death case in California involving a drug overdose, a jail’s for-profit health care provider had to pay $11.1 million of a $12.75 million settlement. The county and city paid the rest.
Officers rarely pay awards related to their own misconduct. If they are held personally responsible, their employer is usually obligated to cover the damages. If their employer is held responsible, taxpayers foot the bill.
Between 2006 and 2011, Ms. Schwartz found, officers contributed .02 percent of the $730 million in civil rights damages paid by 44 of the country’s largest jurisdictions.
Police unions say that these protections allow officers to do their jobs without fear of being sued, while critics say they remove the incentive to reduce unnecessary force and to respect civil rights.
Why is the Botham Shem Jean case different?
Ms. Guyger was returning home after a 13-hour shift when she mistakenly entered Mr. Jean’s apartment instead of her own and shot him, saying later that she believed that he was an intruder.
Mr. Jean, a 26-year-old accountant, had been eating ice cream and watching TV. The killing occurred in 2018, at a time of heightened awareness of racial disparities in policing and the killing of unarmed Black men by the police, and was held up as an example of the perils of “living while Black.”
In a televised trial, Ms. Guyger was convicted of murdering Mr. Jean and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The conviction stripped Ms. Guyger of the civil protections afforded to officers who use deadly force in the course of their jobs and within departmental guidelines, union officials said.
Michael Mata, who is a retired Dallas officer and a former president of the city’s police union, said he had reached out to other police associations at the time to see if any had ever seen a similar case. None had.
Ms. Guyger, who is in prison, waived her right to appear in the civil trial. She is solely responsible for paying the judgment, but she clearly has nothing approaching that kind of money. A lawyer for the family said they did not expect to collect a fortune, but hoped to send a message that police brutality would not be tolerated.
Ms. Schwartz, the U.C.L.A. professor, agreed that the size of the verdict made it symbolically potent.
“I don’t think law enforcement agencies are calculating these costs and weighing them against policy changes as economists might imagine,” she said. “But publicity has an impact.”
The post Why a Police Shooting Victim’s Family Won’t Get a $100 Million Payout appeared first on New York Times.
