$1 Million Settlement After Troopers Repeatedly Tased Man Walking Beside Interstate 81, and He Died
After trial: Settled and approved by the Kanawha County Circuit Court in 2024; final. The court separately allocated the proceeds among the decedent's son and four brothers.
Won by Atkinson & Frampton, PLLC.
Edmond Exline, 45, a paranoid schizophrenic apparently in the middle of a mental-health episode, was walking beside Interstate 81 near Martinsburg when three State Police troopers detained him. Tasers were deployed multiple times. He became unresponsive and was pronounced dead. The State Police settled for $1 million.
What happened
In February 2023 someone called to report a man walking along the side of Interstate 81 outside Martinsburg, West Virginia, who appeared to be intoxicated.
He was not intoxicated. Edmond Exline was 45 years old and a paranoid schizophrenic, and according to his friends and family he was most likely in the middle of a mental-health episode.
Three West Virginia State Police troopers detained him. Tasers were deployed multiple times during what the agency afterward described as a struggle. Exline became unresponsive. He could not be resuscitated, and he was pronounced dead at Berkeley Medical Center.
His son, Edmond Exline II, brought suit as executor of the estate, alleging that the troopers had unlawfully detained his father and used excessive, wrongful and deadly force against a man in psychiatric crisis. Then-Governor Jim Justice publicly called the incident very concerning.
In 2024 the Circuit Court of Kanawha County approved a settlement of $1,000,000, and the court allocated the proceeds among Exline's son and his four brothers.
The estate was represented by John-Mark Atkinson of Atkinson and Frampton in Charleston.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Atkinson & Frampton, PLLC
All Atkinson & Frampton, PLLC proven verdicts →A 14-year-old high school freshman was riding home from a soccer match with her father on Interstate 79 when their vehicle struck the rear of a flatbed semi hauling lumber uphill at 21 mph in the dark. The plaintiffs' case was that the truck should never have been on that road: overloaded by more than 11,000 pounds, inadequately lit, and driven by a man not properly licensed for it.
Related civil rights verdicts
An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.
On December 14, 2019 Emily Gaines, an 18-year-old Moore High School senior, was driving to take the ACT when Sgt. Kyle Lloyd of the Moore Police Department, off duty and rushing a key to another officer's patrol car for a department event, hit her broadside at 95 to 100 mph in a 50 zone. She died at the scene. On April 1, 2026 a federal jury returned $126,000,000. The court entered $90,000,000 against Lloyd, who is in prison, and cut the $36,000,000 against the City to $125,000 under Oklahoma's Governmental Tort Claims Act.
The Popham Law Firm secured a $57 million settlement on behalf of more than 1,700 Sprint employees who alleged the company's automated performance system unlawfully targeted workers over 40 during a series of mass layoffs, at the time the largest ADEA class settlement in the District of Kansas.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.