Baton Rouge Pays $4.5 Million to Alton Sterling's Five Children After Fatal Police Shooting
The City of Baton Rouge agreed to pay $4.5 million to the five children of Alton Sterling, who was fatally shot by police outside a Baton Rouge convenience store in July 2016, after the East Baton Rouge Metro Council approved the settlement in February 2021.
What happened
On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old father of five, was selling CDs outside the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge when officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II responded to a call about a man with a gun. Officers used Tasers and tackled Sterling to the ground. Salamoni then fired six shots into Sterling's chest. Bystander video of the encounter spread quickly and sparked protests across the country.
No criminal charges followed at the state or federal level. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry declined to prosecute, and the Justice Department closed its investigation without charges. Salamoni was eventually fired from the department but was permitted to retire retroactively after appealing his termination. Lake received a three-day suspension.
In 2017, attorneys for Sterling's five children filed a wrongful death and survival action in federal court against the City of Baton Rouge, the Baton Rouge Police Department, former police chief Carl Dabadie, and the two officers. The complaint argued that the shooting stemmed from deficient training, a departmental culture that tolerated excessive force, and a failure to de-escalate confrontations. L. Chris Stewart, alongside co-counsel Dale Glover, Mike Adams, and Brandon DeCuir, represented the children throughout the litigation.
The road to settlement was long. The East Baton Rouge Metro Council rejected three separate settlement offers, including a $5 million proposal that the family had been willing to accept. Stewart publicly warned that a jury verdict, once it heard evidence about supervisors who allowed officers with documented disciplinary problems to remain on the force, could reach nine figures. With trial scheduled for March 2021, the council voted 7-4 in February 2021 to approve a $4.5 million resolution.
The $1 million upfront payment came from the city's insurance reserves. The remaining $3.5 million was to be paid over four years from the city's annual operating budget. Accompanying the settlement, Baton Rouge adopted new use-of-force policies: prohibitions on chokeholds, mandatory verbal warnings before using deadly force, and a ban on firing into moving vehicles. The family formally moved to dismiss the lawsuit in May 2021. No appeal of the settlement has been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.WAFB: Attorneys including L. Chris Stewart file Sterling children's wrongful death lawsuit·Archived copy
- 2.The Advocate (Baton Rouge): Sterling family attorneys warn Baton Rouge after $5M settlement rejected·Archived copy
- 3.NPR: Alton Sterling family accepts $4.5 million settlement for his killing by police·Archived copy
- 4.WBRZ (Baton Rouge): Sterling family accepted $4.5 million settlement, case dismissed May 2021·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Stewart Miller Simmons Trial Attorneys
All Stewart Miller Simmons Trial Attorneys proven verdicts →A Clayton County jury awarded $1 billion to a woman who was raped at age 14 by an armed security guard her employer hired without verifying he was licensed to carry a weapon.
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.
A Forsyth County jury awarded $16 million to a woman sexually assaulted in her Winston-Salem Residence Inn room after a hotel night clerk who had not been properly trained handed a visibly intoxicated stranger a keycard to her room.
The City of North Charleston paid $6.5 million to the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed man shot in the back by a police officer after a routine traffic stop, in what attorney L. Chris Stewart described as the largest pre-lawsuit settlement in South Carolina history.
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.