“His leg bent backwards in the opposite direction that your knee is supposed to bend, so forcefully, that his leg, you can hear it on the video, it makes a horrible crunching popping sound, and it just splits the leg all the way off, except for just a little tissue in the front,” said Barrientos. “The deputies had to apply two tourniquets to save his life because quit literally, Mr. Barrientos was bleeding to death.”
Don’t ever forget that cops are animals.
Only half a million? Hopefully that’s just for starters. The victim deserves millions
Right? I really hope he gets more… I can’t imagine the trauma that would have caused.
Some states limit the initial lawsuit to actual damages (usually provable medical costs). Once the case goes to trial, a jury can find in favor of the victim and assign punitive damages. This is how the infamous hot coffee case worked. The lady suffered third degree burns, the jury found out that McDonald’s had injured a bunch of people with boiling coffee and been warned about it a few more times, and the jury said that $28K wasn’t enough and awarded $3M.
I’d imagine something similar here if this went to trial.
Fucking bankrupt the city so they have no choice but to drop the police department. Make those thugs buy use-of-force insurance to ever work again.
Even if the victim would not deserve millions, the responsible institution needs to be fined as much, just so it hurts them. It must be more expensive to fuck up than it is to prevent fuck-ups. So they should take whatever cost they project to properly train officers for de-escalation, double it and use that as a fine.