$45 Million New Haven Settlement for Randy Cox, Paralyzed in a Police Van, a Record Police Payout
Won by Ben Crump Law.
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.
What happened
On June 19, 2022, New Haven police arrested 36-year-old Richard "Randy" Cox on a weapons charge that was later dropped and placed him, handcuffed and without a seatbelt, in the back of a police transport van. When the driver braked hard to avoid a collision, Cox was hurled headfirst into the metal partition at the front of the van. The impact broke his neck. What happened next made the case a national story: instead of treating the crash as the medical emergency it was, officers at the detention center accused Cox of being drunk and faking his injuries, dragged him from the van by his feet, and put him in a holding cell before he was finally taken to a hospital. He emerged paralyzed from the chest down.
The episode, captured on video, drew immediate comparisons to the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in a Baltimore police van. Cox's family retained Ben Crump, who brought the case together with Connecticut attorneys Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber. The legal team filed a $100 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of New Haven and the officers involved, arguing that the city's failure to secure detainees with seatbelts, and the officers' callous response to a man with a broken neck, amounted to deliberate indifference.
Criminal and disciplinary consequences ran alongside the civil case. Five officers involved in Cox's transport and booking were charged with misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment and cruelty, and New Haven's Board of Police Commissioners fired officers over their treatment of Cox. The city also changed its prisoner-transport policies in the aftermath.
In June 2023, barely a year after the injury, the parties announced a $45 million joint settlement, a figure Cox's lawyers described as the largest police-misconduct settlement in United States history, eclipsing the $27 million Minneapolis paid in the George Floyd case, which Crump had also negotiated. Roughly $30 million of the payment was covered by the city's insurance, with the city responsible for the remainder, and New Haven's Board of Alders subsequently approved the city's funding plan.
For Cox, who now requires round-the-clock care, the settlement funds a lifetime of medical treatment and support. For the broader legal terrain, the case reset the ceiling for police-misconduct recoveries involving a surviving victim, demonstrating that catastrophic-injury cases, with decades of future care ahead, can command sums beyond even the highest-profile wrongful-death settlements.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.CNN: Randy Cox, paralyzed in a New Haven police van, reaches $45M settlement with city (June 2023)·Archived copy
- 2.Connecticut Public Radio: Randy Cox reaches $45 million settlement with city of New Haven·Archived copy
- 3.WBUR: Randy Cox reaches historic $45 million police misconduct settlement with city of New Haven·Archived copy
- 4.City of New Haven press release: Joint settlement reached in Richard Cox v. City of New Haven·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Ben Crump Law
All Ben Crump Law proven verdicts →Lewis Butler, a security guard, was shot eight times and killed in November 2023 during an armed robbery at an internet cafe in Havana, Florida. The cafe's operators had not reported a robbery three weeks earlier in which the gun used against him was stolen. In December 2025 a Gadsden County jury awarded his widow $779,389,024, including $550 million for pain and suffering and $225 million for loss of companionship.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
Ben Crump, with co-counsel Antonio Romanucci and L. Chris Stewart, negotiated a $27 million settlement between the family of George Floyd and the City of Minneapolis, announced by the family's lawyers as the largest pretrial settlement of a civil rights wrongful-death claim in American history. The city council approved the payment unanimously in March 2021, while jury selection in Derek Chauvin's murder trial was underway blocks away.
Charles Payne Sr., 75, died after an HPD patrol car driven by Officer Christopher Cabrera struck his vehicle on North Shepherd Drive in Houston on December 26, 2021. A federal jury found in November 2025 that the City of Houston was deliberately indifferent in adopting an inadequate policy that let officers drive recklessly. It awarded $13 million to his family. The city's new-trial motion was denied and its appeal to the Fifth Circuit is pending.
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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.
Terral Ellis II, 26, walked into the Ottawa County Jail voluntarily on an outstanding warrant. He developed bronchopneumonia and spent twelve days asking for medical care for seizures, sweating and pain. Jail video captured staff and the jail nurse mocking him. He died of septic shock on October 22, 2015.