With five officers having already been fired from the city's police force and charged with second-degree murder over the incident, and Nichols' family being represented by some of the same attorneys who secured a $27 million settlement from the city of Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd, experts say the facts and the law both weigh heavily towards a massive payout.
"I think you're going to see the largest … civil rights violation settlement in the history of Memphis," said Arthur Horne, a Memphis-based plaintiffs' lawyer who has brought multiple actions against the local police department in police misconduct and shooting cases.
The new federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday on behalf of Nichols' mother names the Memphis city government, Police Chief Cerelyn "C.J." Davis, the five police officers and other officials involved in the beating incident.
"The savage beating of Tyre Nichols was the direct and foreseeable product of the unconstitutional policies, practices, customs and decisions of the City of Memphis and Chief Davis," Nichols family attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said in a news release announcing the lawsuit.
The city declined to comment on the suit when contacted by Law360.
"As standard practice, we do not comment on pending litigation," Memphis police spokesman Sergeant Louis C. Brownlee wrote in an email. Allison Fouché, a spokesperson for the city government, likewise declined to comment further on the lawsuit.
But some experts were willing to venture opinions.
Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law and an expert on lawsuits against the police, called a settlement in this case "inevitable" — and she predicted the payout will be significant. She said the complaint from Crump and his co-attorneys was unusually strong, especially for this early in the case.
"It's 139 pages of a tremendous amount of detail, certainly about what happened to Mr. Nichols, but also about the broader systemic failures within the Memphis Police Department, told in pretty compelling detail," said Schwartz, author of the book "Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable."
The lawsuit lays out the following narrative: It says Davis, the new Memphis police chief hired in 2021, created a specialized police unit called the SCORPION unit to combat street crime. The lawsuit alleges that the members of this unit ran wild, stopping and harassing Black men, frequently using excessive force and ultimately leading to the events of Jan. 7.
That evening, police officers conducted a traffic stop on Nichols, a FedEx worker who enjoyed skateboarding and taking photographs. He was pulled from the vehicle, roughed up on the pavement and pepper sprayed. He ran away and an officer fired a stun gun at him.
A short time later, police officers caught Nichols nearby and repeatedly punched and kicked him. One officer hit him with a baton.
Nichols died in a hospital on Jan. 10.
The beating was captured on body camera video and from a nearby overhead surveillance camera. Under public pressure, city authorities released some of the videos within days, an unusual step in a region where authorities usually keep these videos secret for months or years.
Videos of the incident showed Nichols didn't resist the officers.
In addition to firing the five officers who face criminal charges, the city fired additional police officers and some medical personnel following internal investigations.
Small local protests by Nichols' family helped draw attention to the case, and it quickly blew up into a national and international news story that even attracted comments from President Biden, who called video of the incident "horrific."
"It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day," Biden said in a statement.
Dismissal Prospects Dim
Horne said that, in police abuse cases, the city of Memphis usually tries to have lawsuits against the government dismissed, and judges in Tennessee's western district have frequently agreed to do so.
The relevant case is the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision Monell v. Department of Social Services
. It holds that an unconstitutional action by an employee isn't sufficient to prove liability by the government — rather, the unconstitutional act must flow from a government policy or custom.If a judge dismisses civil counts against the government, the lawsuits against individual police officers may continue, Horne said. But the city of Memphis won't pay money judgments on the officers' behalf.
"We do not indemnify officers found liable in their individual capacities," Fouché confirmed Friday to Law360.
That city policy is unwelcome news for plaintiffs lawyers who want to win a big money judgment against a deep-pocketed government, not against police officers who usually lack the resources to pay. But Horne said other factors in the Nichols case make it far less likely that the city will succeed in having the claims against the city government dismissed. He pointed to comments that the police chief told a Memphis City Council committee on Feb. 6.
"This is an issue of a lack of supervision," Davis told the city council members that day, according to a report in a local newspaper, The Commercial Appeal.
"There should be a supervisor embedded in various numbers of officers. We realize we have a supervisor shortage," she said. "This is a classic example of officers with a wolf pack mentality, ego and other issues that mushroomed into a very tragic situation that, as it's been said, could have been avoided."
Horne said those comments will play straight into lawyers' arguments that the death of Nichols resulted from a systemic problem caused by the city, rather than the actions of a few bad officers.
"I mean, it's a rare situation where the police chief comes out publicly and says, 'Hey, these officers weren't properly supervised,'" Horne said. "That's like a lawyer's wet dream, that statement on a claim like this."
Qualified Immunity
One of the other factors that makes it hard to win lawsuits against police is the doctrine of qualified immunity. It's a legal doctrine that protects police from liability unless they clearly break the law or violate someone's rights.
But the city of Memphis will have a far harder time using that defense in the Nichols case, Schwartz said.
"It's a situation where the police chief has already fired the officers," she said. "The officers have already been criminally prosecuted."
And the massive public attention to the case will make a difference, too.
"I think that when there is a lot of public attention, there's a great deal of interest in resolving the cases quickly and not having to litigate qualified immunity, for example."
Impact Of A Settlement
Given that a settlement is likely, what might be its impact?
For Schwartz, the department's decision to disband the SCORPION unit is already a policy change.
"There's going to be leverage that the family has, and the attorneys have in this case, to negotiate policy change as part of the settlement. And I certainly hope that they do, but I have no way of knowing what they might have in mind."
Horne, the Memphis attorney, said he believes a settlement might take some time and pointed out the current Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland is term-limited. City voters will pick a new mayor on Oct. 5.
The new mayor will likely choose a new police chief, he said. Those new officials will likely face political pressure to settle the case.
"I think the right thing to do is to pay the family," Horne said. "From a purely emotional, political, just a human perspective, right. Taking the law out of it."
Sunita Patel, an assistant professor of law also at UCLA Law School who formerly helped litigate a suit against New York city's stop-and-risk policy, likewise predicts the Nichols case will end in a settlement. She said it may draw extra attention nationwide to the use of specialized police units like the SCORPION unit. The fact that Memphis already broke up the SCORPION unit means advocates around the county can point to it as an example
"The statistics show they have disproportionate rates of violence," Patel said. "We just really don't need them."
Nichols' mother RowVaughn Wells is represented by Ben Crump, Chris O'Neal and Brooke Cluse of Ben Crump Law, David Mendelson and Benjamin Wachtel of Mendelson Law Firm, Antonio Romanucci, Bhavani Raveendran, Bryce Hensley and Sarah Raisch of Romanucci & Blandin LLC, Lashonda Council Rogers of Council & Associates LLC and Earnestine Hunt Dorse.
Attorney information for the city of Memphis and the individual officials was not available Friday.
The case is RowVaughn Wells v. The City of Memphis et al., case number 2:23-cv-02224, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.
--Editing by Dave Trumbore.
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