Courthouse Files

The family of a man who fell off a police boat while handcuffed and allowed to drown by the Missouri state trooper operating the boat will receive a $9 million settlement, attorneys announced Thursday.
And there is still a chance the cop will be convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Brandon Ellingson, a 20-year-old college student from Iowa who had been arrested for boating while intoxicated.

A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court this week accuses a New Hampshire cop of sexually harassing his female trainee and saying he “wanted to just take (women) out and rape them rather than issue a citation” when he pulled them over, according to whio.com.

Five months after agreeing to pay a $45,000 settlement to a man they arrested for recording them tasering a man on his front porch, the Allentown Police Department is being sued again.
This time, by the man they tasered and tortured that night.

They were so sure of themselves, these California cops who raided a marijuana dispensary last year, terrorizing customers while wearing masks, forcing them to the floor at gunpoint, then disabling surveillance cameras inside the shop to ensure their crime went unnoticed.
But the Santa Ana cops failed to remove a hidden camera, which caught them eating marijuana-laced snacks while mocking a handicapped woman.

For the price of $70,000, Punta Gorda police officer Lee Coel can claim he did nothing wrong by allowing his dog to attack and maul a man for riding his bicycle at night without lights.

Former Paradise police officer Patrick Feaster was found guilty of manslaughter today for the shooting death of a DUI suspect last November in an incident captured on his own dash cam.
Feaster, who won numerous awards for the number of DUI arrests he made, faces five years in prison. He has not yet been sentenced.

Colorado Springs police pulled over a pair of black brothers in a white neighborhood last year without telling them the reason for the traffic stop, pulling both men out the car at gunpoint and frisking them before handcuffing them.
The passenger of the car, Ryan Brown, began recording and narrating the scene until he was shoved face first into the snow. His phone was pried out of his hand, turned off and tossed aside.

Like most politicians, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine campaigned on a platform of promising better transparency to his constituents.
And like most politicians, he proved to be a liar.
But unlike most politicians, he is being sued over his broken promise.
The lawsuit, which you can read here, was filed by Photography is Not a Crime’s very own Grant Stern.

An award-winning California deputy who has been sued three times in six years for beating citizens with his flashlight remains on the force, even after the latest lawsuit against him settled for $200,000 on Tuesday.
Of course, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department never admitted to any wrongdoing in any of the settlements involving deputy Paul “Scotte” Pfeifer.
But two of three incidents were caught on video, showing us there was plenty of wrongdoing on his part.
So it’s only a matter of time before he strikes again with his flashlight.

In a case of excessive road rage, Florida sheriff’s deputy Sheila Langlais lost her cool and pulled a gun on an unassuming couple in a car with a 2-year-old in the back seat.
Now the Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy is out of a job and will spend nearly a year in jail in addition to paying a $500 fine.
The embattled deputy has resigned from three law enforcement agencies since 2001.
It all went down on February 7 when Brett Dowd and his fiancee, Brittany Byrne, were driving in the parking lot of Twin Lakes apartment complex to visit friends for a cookout.