Federal Jury Awards $350,000 to Chicago Man After Officer Jason Van Dyke's Excessive Force at Traffic Stop
Won by McCready Law.
A federal jury awarded Edward Nance $350,000 after Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke violently handcuffed him during a 2007 traffic stop, tearing both rotator cuffs and ending his ability to work.
What happened
In October 2007, Chicago police officers stopped Edward Nance in the Gresham district for a missing front license plate. What began as a routine traffic enforcement encounter escalated when Van Dyke's partner ordered Nance out of the car, slammed his head onto the hood, and Van Dyke then violently handcuffed him and threw him into the back seat of a squad car.
Nance was not charged with any crime. The physical damage from the arrest, though, was severe. He had worked for Comcast and supplemented his income as a referee for Illinois High School Association football and basketball games. After the stop, he required rotator cuff surgeries on both shoulders. The injuries left him unable to continue either job.
Nance filed a civil rights lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, naming Van Dyke, Van Dyke's partner, the City of Chicago, and other Chicago Police Department members. Attorney Michael McCready of McCready Law represented Nance at trial. McCready's team presented evidence that Van Dyke used force that bore no reasonable relationship to any threat Nance posed during a stop that arose entirely from a missing license plate.
The federal jury found that Van Dyke had used excessive force and returned a verdict of $350,000 for Nance's shoulder injuries and lost income. Despite the verdict, the Independent Police Review Authority deemed the underlying complaint 'unsustained,' citing a lack of independent witnesses present during the stop. Neither Van Dyke nor his partner faced departmental discipline.
The case drew renewed national attention in late 2015 after Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the October 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. Following news of that charge, Nance told McCready: 'If they had done something about this cop in our case, this young boy would still be alive.' The $350,000 verdict in Nance's favor stands as the documented federal judgment against Van Dyke for the 2007 incident.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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.