Largest Civil Rights Personal Injury Verdicts Never Collected

Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis served as court-appointed co-lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation over Capital One's 2019 data breach, which exposed the personal information of roughly 98 million U.S. customers. The $190 million settlement won final approval in 2022 as one of the largest data breach recoveries in U.S. history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Haitian-American urological surgeon was subjected to a felony-level takedown on the Santa Monica Freeway after LAPD ran the plates on his rental car and received a stolen-vehicle alert caused by Budget Rent-A-Car's own plate error.

At CoreCivic's Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby, Montana, an inmate serving a double life sentence let himself out of his own locked pod and into Nathaniel Lake's, then beat and choked him for more than three and a half minutes with no staff intervention. Lake was in a coma for 33 days and has a permanent brain injury.

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 federal jury in Spokane awarded $26.75 million to the estate of Cindy Lou Hill, a 55-year-old woman who died of a perforated intestine in the Spokane County Jail after NaphCare staff attributed her symptoms to heroin withdrawal, though the Ninth Circuit vacated the $24 million punitive portion in 2025 and the case was dismissed on remand.

Gregory Gross, an Army veteran, was left paralyzed after Yuba City officers slammed him to the ground during a 2020 traffic stop, breaking his neck; Moseley Collins secured a $20 million settlement in July 2023.

Justine Ruszczyk Damond called 911 to report a woman screaming behind her house, then walked out in her pajamas to meet the squad car. Officer Mohamed Noor shot her from the passenger seat. Minneapolis settled with her family for $20 million in May 2019, more than four times the largest police payout in the city's history.

Erie Moore Sr., 57, a mill worker with no criminal record, was arrested on October 12, 2015 for disturbing the peace at a Monroe doughnut shop and taken to Richwood Correctional Center, a private jail LaSalle Corrections ran for the city. Over about 36 hours guards pepper-sprayed him repeatedly, struck him on the head, slammed him head-first into the floor, and left him roughly 90 minutes in an area with no cameras and no medical check. He died on November 14, 2015 of a brain hematoma; the parish coroner ruled it a homicide. On October 20, 2025 a federal jury awarded his three children $42,750,000. In May and June 2026 the court remitted it to $16,741,148.84 with a further fault reduction, and both sides appealed.

Madison Jensen, 21, was booked into the Duchesne County Jail in 2016 after her father contacted authorities for help with her heroin addiction and suicidal thoughts. Over four days of withdrawal she could not keep food or water down. She died of severe dehydration. The jury found the county had failed to train its staff or set any protocol for inmate medical problems.

Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Rochester man in the middle of a mental health crisis, died in March 2020 after police officers put a spit hood over his head and held him face down on the pavement until he stopped breathing. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide from asphyxia during restraint, though a state grand jury declined to indict the officers. Elliot D. Shields of Roth & Roth, LLP filed the family's federal civil rights suit against the City of Rochester in September 2020. On October 6, 2022, a federal judge approved a $12 million settlement, split evenly between pain-and-suffering and wrongful death claims, with the city admitting no liability.

Ben Crump, alongside Louisville co-counsel Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker, settled the wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Breonna Taylor's mother against the City of Louisville for $12 million, the largest police-misconduct payout in the city's history, paired with a package of policing reforms the family made a non-negotiable condition of the deal.

Brian Ortiz, 18, was beaten by another inmate at Maricopa County's Fourth Avenue Jail; deputies saw him unconscious during two separate walkthroughs and did not intervene, and he did not reach a hospital until more than two hours after the assault. Maricopa County settled the resulting civil rights lawsuit for $11.75 million.

Cheryl Rhines pulled onto the shoulder of Route 78 in Newark in October 2017 while having a stroke. A New Jersey State Police trooper with about two years on the job read her slurred speech, facial drooping and inability to stand as intoxication, arrested her, and had her taken to a State Police station instead of a hospital five minutes away, delaying treatment by roughly two and a half hours. An Essex County jury found the state liable in January 2025 and put her total damages at $19.1 million, then attributed 40% of her disability to the stroke itself. After that reduction and an adjustment for disability benefits she had already received, the judgment came to $10,882,432.20, and the trial judge refused to disturb it in April 2025. Dennis M. Donnelly represented Rhines, who has global aphasia and can no longer work.

Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore secured a $10 million settlement from the City of Seattle on behalf of more than 50 protesters who were struck by blast balls, tear gas, and other crowd-control weapons deployed by Seattle Police Department officers during the May and June 2020 George Floyd demonstrations.

A legal team led by Ben Crump negotiated a $10 million settlement between the City of Columbus and the family of Andre Hill, an unarmed 47-year-old Black man fatally shot by officer Adam Coy while walking out of a garage holding his cellphone. The city council's May 2021 approval made it the largest settlement in Columbus history.

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.

Early on April 10, 2009, off-duty Chicago police detective Joseph Frugoli, driving with a blood alcohol level about three times the legal limit, slammed his SUV into a car stopped on the shoulder of the Dan Ryan Expressway with a flat tire. The car caught fire and both occupants, 23-year-old Andrew Cazares and 21-year-old Fausto Manzera, were killed. The families sued Frugoli and the City of Chicago, arguing a departmental 'code of silence' had let Frugoli drink and drive for years without discipline. The city settled in December 2017 during closing arguments, and the Chicago City Council approved the payout on February 28, 2018: $20 million total, split evenly between the two families. Timothy Cavanagh and Michael Sorich were attorneys of record for the Cazares side, which took $10 million; Kevin Conway of Cooney & Conway represented the Manzera family.

The parents of Madaline Pitkin, who died in the Washington County Jail in Hillsboro, Oregon in 2014 while going through untreated heroin withdrawal, recovered a $10 million settlement from Washington County and its jail medical contractor, Corizon Health, after a federal judge approved the deal in December 2018.

E. Spencer Parris and G. Christopher Olson of Martin and Jones secured a $7.52 million settlement for Dwayne Allen Dail, who spent 18 years in a North Carolina prison before DNA evidence identified the actual perpetrator and cleared his name.