$2.5 Million Verdict for Daughter of Unarmed Howard Student Prince Jones, Killed by Undercover Officer
A Prince George's County jury found an undercover officer liable for fatally shooting Prince Jones, an unarmed Howard University student stopped in a case of mistaken identity, and awarded his young daughter $2.5 million.
What happened
Prince Carmen Jones Jr. was 25 years old, a Howard University student and personal trainer who was preparing to enter the Navy and had a baby daughter. On the night of September 1, 2000, an undercover Prince George's County narcotics officer, Corporal Carlton Jones (no relation), was searching for a suspect who had stolen a police handgun. He fixed on the wrong man.
The officer, in plain clothes and driving an unmarked car, followed Prince Jones for roughly 15 miles, out of Maryland and into Fairfax County, Virginia, stopping him near his fiancee's home. The officer said he identified himself as police, that Jones then rammed his vehicle, and that he fired in self-defense. He fired 16 shots. Several struck Prince Jones, five of them in the back. Jones was unarmed. Fairfax County prosecutors filed no criminal charges, citing mistaken identity.
The family brought a wrongful-death suit in the Circuit Court for Prince George's County. Patrick Malone, with co-counsel Terrell N. Roberts III, represented Prince Jones's young daughter and his father. Before the case could be tried, it turned on a fight over which state's law applied. In 2003 the Maryland Court of Appeals cleared the way for the suit to go forward in Maryland and let Prince Jones's young daughter pursue a wrongful-death claim, holding that Maryland law governed who could bring the action.
At trial the firm called witnesses who testified that the Jeep was not moving when the officer opened fire, contradicting the account that Jones had used his vehicle as a weapon. In January 2006 the jury found that Corporal Jones was negligent, that he used excessive force, and that he could not reasonably have believed his conduct was lawful. The jurors awarded $3.7 million in all: $2.5 million to the man's young daughter, the firm's client, $1 million to his mother, who was separately represented, and $200,000 to his father.
The award did not survive intact. Because Virginia law governed the damages and does not permit the parents of an adult child to recover, the trial judge struck the $1 million awarded to the mother and the $200,000 awarded to the father. The $2.5 million for the daughter remained, and the case ultimately resolved for that amount.
The killing later reached a wide audience when writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who knew Jones from Howard, wrote about him in his 2015 book "Between the World and Me."
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Patrick Malone & Associates, P.C.
All Patrick Malone & Associates, P.C. proven verdicts →Patrick Malone won an $8.85 million verdict against the maker of Tylenol after a former White House aide lost his liver to a drug he took exactly as directed.
A D.C. Superior Court jury awarded $8.35 million after an orthopedic surgeon failed to recognize the loss of blood flow to an 82-year-old patient's leg following a knee replacement, leaving the limb to die and require an above-knee amputation.
A Montgomery County jury found a Maryland dermatology practice liable for the death of 47-year-old attorney Richard Semsker, whose melanoma went untreated for two years.
A 40-year-old store manager was left permanently impaired after a radiologist dismissed signs of a carotid blockage on her MRI, and a D.C. jury awarded $5,774,156 for the malpractice that preceded her stroke.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.