The Critical Screening Choice: How to Assess Civil-Rights Cases Before You Commit Hundreds of Hours and Costs

Sarah Gelsomino | Friedman, Gilbert + Gerhardstein

Sarah Gelsomino is a partner and trial lawyer at FG+G, Ohio’s preeminent civil rights and criminal defense law firm. Sarah has dedicated her career to advocating for those whom the criminal legal system abuses and disregards. Sarah and her team work hard to shed light on injustice and empower victimized people to speak truth to power. She has secured tens of millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements for her clients, freed wrongfully convicted people from prison, and successfully defended people charged with crimes ranging from misdemeanors to domestic terrorism.

Sarah’s civil rights practice focuses on police and government misconduct, representing people who have been killed, brutalized, sexually assaulted, illegally searched, or wrongfully arrested by police and prison officials. She also represents First Amendment demonstrators, criminal defendants, and wrongfully imprisoned people in post-conviction proceedings. Sarah frequently represents trans and queer individuals who face discrimination in the criminal legal system.

After graduating cum laude from DePaul University Law School in Chicago, Sarah practiced for many years at one of the nation’s top civil rights firms (People’s Law Office). There she worked with some of the nation’s most successful civil rights lawyers. This broad base of experience positioned her to come home to Cleveland in 2016 to continue her work for justice.

Sarah has appeared in many national and international media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, USA Today, and The Independent (London). She regularly appears in local news outlets related to her victories and to comment on breaking news. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Ohio Families Against Police Brutality Community Hero Award; Ohio Association of Justice Optimist Award; Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honorary Society, DePaul University Chapter, Distinguished Alumni Honoree; and National Lawyers Guild, Chicago Chapter, Arthur Kinoy People’s Law Award.

Sarah is a leader in the legal community, serving on the Board of Directors of the Ohio Association of Justice (Civil Rights Section Chair), the Cleveland Academy of Trial Attorneys, and the William K Thomas Inn of Court.

Sarah is also a dedicated Board Member of the Northeast Coalition for Homeless.

Flint Taylor | Peoples’s Law Office

As a student and lawyer, he has been dedicated to litigating against police violence and racism for more than 54 years. Among the landmark cases that Mr. Taylor has been a lead lawyer are the Fred Hampton Black Panther case; the Greensboro, North Carolina case against the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis; the Ford Heights Four case; and a series of cases arising from a pattern and practice of police torture and cover-up by former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, former Mayor Richard M. Daley, former State’s Attorney Richard Devine, and numerous other police and government officials. He and his PLO co-counsel obtained a multi-million-dollar settlement for a seven year old boy who was falsely accused by the Chicago Police of the murder of 11 year old Ryan Harris and Taylor has represented, and continues to represent, numerous wrongfully convicted persons who have spent decades in prison and on death row, including more than a dozen Burge torture survivors. He and sister PLO lawyer Jan Susler also represented the first woman jailhouse lawyer in Illinois, Maxine Smith, winning her freedom from segregation and a large jury verdict.

Taylor’s and his fellow PLO lawyers’ work in fighting against police torture in Chicago for more than 35 years has been instrumental in obtaining the conviction and imprisonment of police torture ringleader Jon Burge and the precedent setting decision that upheld the inclusion of former Mayor Richard M. Daley as a co-conspiring defendant in the Michael Tillman and Alonzo Smith civil rights cases. He also worked with the movement to obtain reparations for 60 survivors of Chicago police torture and recently won the freedom and exoneration of police torture survivor Jackie Wilson after 36 years of wrongful imprisonment. He was also one of the lead lawyers representing Nanci Koschman in her case against the CPD and SAO for covering up the truth about the death of her son in order to protect the Daley family and in obtaining a multi-million-dollar settlement for 74 victims of illegal strip and body cavity searches by the Milwaukee Police Department. He was part of the legal team that obtained the largest settlement of its kind for the family of an African American man who was fatally shot by a Little Rock police officer and represented three victims of torture and abuse at the CPD’s secret interrogation site, known as Homan Square. He and fellow PLO lawyer Ben Elson obtained a multi-million-dollar settlement for the family of a Milwaukee man who suffocated to death in the back of a Milwaukee police car. Most recently, he and Elson successfully litigated the Marcus Deon Smith case in Greensboro that exposed a pattern and practice of racially and sexually discriminatory police hogtying and obtained a multi-million-dollar settlement for Smith’s family that included a memorial in honor of Marcus.

Taylor also played a major role in the George Jones “street files” case that uncovered the unlawful Chicago police practice of keeping one set of files to be produced to defense lawyers while maintaining another secret set of files that often-contained exculpatory evidence. This case dramatically changed the criminal discovery process in Cook County and also led to the groundbreaking wrongful prosecution verdict in Jones v. City of Chicago. As a police brutality litigator, he has been instrumental in pioneering and litigating Monell pattern and practice claims against municipalities, particularly in the areas of repeater cops, police discipline, the police code of silence, and torture and domestic violence by police officers. Taylor also played a key role in major litigation brought against the Marion Federal Penitentiary, Stateville and Pontiac prisons in the areas of unconstitutional segregation, cruel and unusual conditions of confinement, and behavior modification.

Mr. Taylor is also an accomplished appellate advocate and successfully argued the civil rights cases of Cleavinger v. Saxner and Buckley v. Fitzsimmons before the United States Supreme Court, as well as numerous cases before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the Illinois Supreme Court, and the Illinois Appellate Court.

I. Why are civil rights cases important | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

• We are going to break down claims available to people whose rights are violated and talk about how to evaluate them with these claims and defenses in mind
• Fourth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment (due process/substantive/deliberate indifference, equal protection), First Amendment, equal protection
• Bivens vs. §1983: Identifying when to consider federal constitutional claims vs. state analogs
• Overlays: ADA/RA claims, state torts (false arrest, assault, battery), supplemental claims
• In each section on claims, we will address intake consideration
  • Crafting intake questions that enable rapid issue spotting (force, search, arrest, detention, retaliation, municipal policies)
  • Red flags to watch for at intake (gaps in timeline, absence of contemporaneous evidence, delayed reporting, conflicting versions)
  • Evidence to gather and preserve to complete investigation

II. Police claims | 1:10pm – 1:20pm

• Mapping factual scenarios to legal claims under the 4th and 14th Amendments
  • Wrongful conviction/malicious prosecution
  • Use of force – 4th and 14th amendments
  • Illegal stops, arrests, searches, and seizures
• State law claims
• Intake considerations including statutes of limitations and Heck v. Humphrey

III. Prisoner litigation | 1:20pm – 1:30pm

• Prison Litigation Reform Act
• Recent SCOTUS case? (carves narrow exception for exhausting grievances, it’s a question of fact to be determined by the jury, entangled with the merits)
• Jail vs prison (14th Amendment vs. 8th Amendment)
• Jail and prison suicide cases
• Jail and prison force cases
• Failure to protect (prisoners on prisoner cases)
• Failure to provide access to medical care vs medical malpractice cases vs. medical negligence cases

IV. Monell and supervisory liability | 1:30pm – 1:40pm

• Pros and cons of bringing a Monell claim
• What modes of municipal liability to target (policy, pattern, custom, failure to hire, train, discipline failure to supervise, ratification; final policymaker involvement)
• Early fact probes: Prior incidents, internal investigations, internal discipline, pattern databases, complaint systems, written policies vs. de facto practices
• How to develop theories to survive dispositive motions
• Tactical decisions: Whether to request policy documents or demand early sample sets

V. Experts | 1:40pm – 1:50pm

• Why is it important to identify the right experts for your facts, your jurisdiction, Monell claim, damages, etc
• How to find the right experts?

VI. Bivens and FTCA | 1:50pm – 2:00pm

• How and whether to bring Bivens claims against individual federal actors
  • Supreme Court limitations of Bivens claims to essentially identical factual claims as those set forth in Bivens, Carlson v. Green and Passman Carlson, Passman
• Choosing defendants: Officers, supervisors, municipalities, private actors, chains of command; capacity to be sued; service deadlines
• How are these cases being litigated in ICE cases
• Damages, trial
• FTCA claims against the Government

Break | 2:00pm – 2:10pm

VII. Immunities and early dismissal threats | 2:10pm – 2:20pm

• Qualified Immunity
• Absolute prosecutorial/judicial/legislative immunities
• State law immunities – Reckless
• Interlocutory appeals and jurisdictional motions to dismiss

VIII. Damages and remedies | 2:20pm – 2:30pm

• Economic vs. noneconomic damages, punitive damages under §1983, injunctive or declaratory relief
• Medical/psych expert viability: When to budget for them; threshold for psychological injury, life-care planning
• Settlement airway: Sanity-checking prior verdicts, negotiating in light of defense posture

IX. Case cost & fee strategy | 2:30pm – 2:40pm

• §1988 fee-shifting realities: Lodestar vs. contingency; budgeting for experts, depositions, travel, discovery
• Evaluating whether the case can absorb cost risk: Small firm/solo triage
• Co-counsel, funding partners, litigation advance strategies

X. Client considerations | 2:40pm – 2:50pm

• Trauma informed approach, client credibility, memory limitations, and capturing initial narrative
• Respect for clients, their life experiences; consideration of their view of the case and the added trauma that depositions, trial vs. the vindication sought

XI. Evidence triage & preservation essentials | 2:50pm – 3:00pm

• What to demand immediately: Body-worn/surveillance video, CAD/911/dispatch logs, medical & jail records, 911/comms recordings, booking records, photos and scene documentation
• Spoliation risk: Draft and issue preservation letters, document retention holds, forensic imaging, chain-of-custody warnings
• Witness triage: Who to contact early, how to get independent witnesses on record, handling reluctant or coerced witnesses

XII. Forecasting defense strategy & counterattack | 3:00pm – 3:10pm

• Anticipating motions: Motions to dismiss, summary judgment, early dispositive motions targeting immunities or Monell flaws
• Criminal overlap: How ongoing prosecutions, plea bargains, or suppression issues can affect civil claims
• Media & PR risk: How defense may try to frame narrative; strategic protective orders or gag clauses
• Impact of criminal indictment, trial, conviction or acquittal of law enforcement defendant has on the civil case