$10.25 Million Verdict for Paralyzed Man Left on Tulsa Jail Cell Floor for Days
After trial: Paid. The jury returned $10,250,000, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed liability and the awards on August 20, 2019 (935 F.3d 960), remanding only on a possible setoff.
Won by Smolen & Roytman.
Elliott Earl Williams, 37, was arrested in Owasso on an obstruction complaint in October 2011. Shortly after booking at the Tulsa County Jail he suffered a severe neck injury that paralysed him from the chest down. He was left on the floor of a medical-unit cell, unable to move, for days, and died of complications of the untreated injury and dehydration.
What happened
Elliott Earl Williams was 37. He was arrested in Owasso, Oklahoma in October 2011 on an obstruction complaint and taken to the Tulsa County Jail.
Shortly after booking he suffered a severe neck injury. It paralysed him from the chest down.
Nobody treated it. He was left naked on the floor of a cell in the jail's own medical unit, unable to move, for days. A federal judge later wrote that the cell had become his burial crypt.
He died of complications of the untreated spinal injury and of dehydration.
The jury found the Sheriff's office deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs under the Fourteenth Amendment, and found supervisory liability against Sheriff Stanley Glanz personally. It awarded $10,000,000 in compensatory damages against Glanz and Sheriff Vic Regalado, plus $250,000 in punitive damages against Glanz individually.
The Tenth Circuit affirmed liability and both awards in 2019, in Burke v. Regalado, 935 F.3d 960. It remanded on one narrow question: whether the defendants could set off an earlier settlement the estate had reached with the jail's medical provider.
Rather than litigate that, the parties settled. Tulsa County paid the estate $10 million in 2019, and how the county's residents would fund it became a local story of its own.
At the time this was reported as the largest civil rights death recovery in Oklahoma history. It has since been passed twice, by the Ellis judgment out of Ottawa County and by the Young verdict against the Tulsa County Jail's medical contractor. All three came out of Oklahoma county jails, and two of the three came out of this one.
The estate was represented by Robert M. Blakemore and Daniel E. Smolen of Smolen and Roytman, with Louis W. Bullock of Bullock, Bullock and Blakemore as co-counsel.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Smolen & Roytman
All Smolen & Roytman proven verdicts →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.
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.