$8 Million Settlement for Man Paralyzed by Cedar Rapids Police Officer
Won by RSH Legal.
Cedar Rapids' insurer paid $8 million to Jerime Mitchell, a quadriplegic man shot by Officer Lucas Jones during a 2016 traffic stop, in what attorneys described as the largest police-misconduct settlement in Iowa history.
What happened
Just after 1:00 a.m. on November 1, 2016, Cedar Rapids Police Sergeant Lucas Jones stopped Jerime Mitchell's truck because of a broken rear license plate light. What followed left Mitchell paralyzed from the neck down. Jones fired three shots into the vehicle, severing Mitchell's spinal cord and rendering him a quadriplegic.
A Linn County grand jury cleared Jones of criminal charges, and he remained on the force. Mitchell and his wife Bracken filed a civil lawsuit against Jones individually and against the City of Cedar Rapids. The litigation revealed that Jones had deliberately deactivated his audio recording equipment during the traffic stop, hiding what occurred from supervisors. Investigators later found he had done the same thing during a separate stop two days earlier, on October 30, 2016. In June 2020, the department fired Jones for policy violations tied to that earlier stop and for lying under oath about it.
RSH Legal attorneys Pressley Henningsen, Laura Schultes, and Emily Anderson represented the Mitchells in both the district court proceedings and on appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court. In Mitchell v. City of Cedar Rapids, 926 N.W.2d 222 (Iowa 2019), the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's order compelling defendants to produce police investigative reports, clearing the way for full civil discovery into the department's conduct.
With trial set to begin April 20, 2021, Cedar Rapids' insurance carrier, States Insurance, reached a settlement the day before proceedings were to start. The company agreed to pay $8 million to resolve all claims, with no admission of fault or liability by the city or Jones. The Cedar Rapids City Council later approved execution of the agreement.
Mitchell's legal team characterized the amount as a record settlement for a police-involved shooting case in Iowa. Jerime Mitchell, speaking after the agreement was announced, said no sum could replace what he lost: "I would give back that money or any amount of money to have my normal life." The $8 million provides for his lifetime of care needs as a quadriplegic.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Iowa Public Radio: Cedar Rapids insurer to pay $8 million to man shot, paralyzed by police officer (Apr. 19, 2021)·Archived copy
- 2.Newsweek: Cedar Rapids Man Paralyzed by Cop Shooting Gets $8M Payout (Apr. 20, 2021)·Archived copy
- 3.KCRG: City of Cedar Rapids agrees to $8 million settlement in Jerime Mitchell lawsuit (Apr. 19, 2021)·Archived copy
- 4.Radio Iowa: $8 million settlement reached in Cedar Rapids traffic stop shooting (Apr. 19, 2021)·Archived copy
- 5.Iowa Supreme Court: Mitchell v. City of Cedar Rapids, 926 N.W.2d 222 (2019) (RSH Legal attorneys named as appellees' counsel)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from RSH Legal
All RSH Legal proven verdicts →A Waterloo man lost all feeling below the waist after a cervical radiofrequency ablation at the C5-6 level in December 2014. A Black Hawk County jury found Dr. Ashar Afzal and Cedar Valley Medical Specialists negligent and awarded $7.36 million to him and his wife. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2021.
Ross Hall died after what his family alleged was negligent cardiology care. The jury awarded $5,500,000, and the allocation is the striking part: only $250,000 for his own pain and suffering before death, and the remaining $5.25 million to his widow and three children for what they lost.
A Black Hawk County jury awarded $1.8 million to Massachusetts sound engineer Frank Sgambellone after a State of Iowa forklift operator ran over his ankle during post-concert teardown at the UNI-Dome in February 2016.
A Cerro Gordo County jury found Good Shepherd, a Mason City nursing home, negligent and willful and wanton in its care of an 84-year-old dementia resident who lost 43 pounds and died of dehydration in April 2015. It awarded her four children $150,000 in compensatory and $750,000 in punitive damages. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2018.
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.