LOS ANGELES (CN) — A federal jury awarded close to $12 million in damages Thursday to a Dodgers who was hit in the eye and partially blinded by a rubber bullet fired by LAPD officers during the 2020 World Series celebrations.
The jury took only a few hours to find two LAPD officers liable for excessive force and negligence that resulted in the injury to Isaac Castellanos on the night he came to downtown LA where Dodgers had assembled to celebrate their team’s first World Series victory in more than 30 years.
“We knew the truth would prevail,” Castellanos’ attorney Pedram Esfandiary said after the verdict was returned. “The jury sent a clear message that we don’t tolerate it when police officers break the rules.”
Michael Williamson, an attorney for the two police officers and the city of LA, declined to comment.
Attorneys for Castellanos and the LAPD officers gave their closing arguments Thursday, providing diametrically opposing accounts of what police protocol requires under the circumstances and what the evidence had proven during the six-day trial.
Esfandiary, Castellanos’ lawyer, argued the two officers violated LAPD policy by discharging their 37 mm so-called less-lethal weapons to disperse the crowd at a downtown intersection without warning and from a distance that far exceeded the recommended range for the weapons.
He disputed the officers’ testimony that it hadn’t been feasible for them to first issue a dispersal order or a warning because the crowd was throwing bottles at them.
“They had two minutes,” Esfandiary said, referring to the time that elapsed between a bottle being thrown toward the police and the officers discharging their weapons. “This wasn’t a split-second decision.”
Castellanos, who is now 27, testified last week that he had gone to downtown LA with a group of friends the night the Dodgers secured their first World Series victory in more than 30 years. When police arrived at the intersection where he and his friends were watching the festive Dodgers fans, Castellanos said, people started to move away from the intersection.
But as he turned around to make sure one of his friends was with him, he testified, he got struck in his right eye by a rubber bullet, sustaining permanent vision loss in that eye.
Williamson said in his closing statement that there was no evidence a projectile fired by the officers caused the injury to the plaintiff’s eye.
The officers, Williamson told the jury, followed procedure by firing the projectiles on the ground before the crowd — so that they would skip up into the people to disperse among them. When they are confronting a violent crowd, it’s a judgment call for the officers to make if they give a warning first, he said.
Moreover, according to the LAPD’s attorney, there was no evidence that it was a projectile fired by the two officers that hit Castellanos in the eye.
The 37 mm projectiles, he said, would have lost most of their velocity when fired over the distance the plaintiff claims and after first hitting the ground, which presumably would make it unlikely or impossible that they could have caused the damage to his eye that Castellanos claims.
“They can’t prove causation,” Williamson told the jurors. “The rest is just guesswork and speculation.”
Castellanos claims damages for excessive force and negligence under both federal and California state law.
Esfandiary asked the jury to award as much as $13 million combined for his client’s future medical costs, future loss of earnings and for his past and future noneconomic damages, such as pain and emotional distress.
