If you don’t know, now you know. Gregory Hill Jr. was shot and killed in his garage by police. According to local sources, police came to Hill’s home on the afternoon of Jan. 14, 2014 after receiving a complaint that he was playing loud music at his home. Deputy Sheriff Christopher Newman and Deputy Edward Lopez pounded on Hill’s front door at 3 p.m. and kept pounding untill Hill responed. He opened up his garage door where he was listening to music, then immediately put it back down. This is where the part of if you don’t know comes in. Police said Hill was holding a gun. The deputies said he was and other witnesses, including Hill’s 9-year-old daughter who was sitting on a bench across the street, said he was not. As the garage door closed, Newman fired four shots, hitting Hill three times, including a shot to the head that killed him instantly. The sheriff’s office called in a SWAT team, who tear-gassed the home before officers went in and found Hill’s body. Police reportedly found an unloaded gun in Hill’s back pocket.
A sheriff’s statement said Deputy Christopher Newman, who fired the fatal shots, was “placed in a very difficult situation, and like so many fellow law enforcement officers must do every day, he made the best decision he could for the safety of his partner, himself, and the public given the circumstances he faced.” Hill’s family wasn’t going for it and took the mess to the black robes. A grand jury in Florida brought no charges, so Hill’s family turned to federal court, filing a civil rights lawsuit against Newman and his department. The family’s attorney, John Phillips said the jurors, one black man, two white men and five white women, seemed receptive to the family’s case during the trial, but confused by the instructions the judge gave for their deliberations last week. The instructions said they could award $1 in “nominal damages” to the family if Hill’s injuries weren’t clearly the result of unjustifiable force. But that part of the instruction was supposed to apply only to the federal civil rights claim, which the jury decided entirely in the deputy’s favor. On the state-law claim, they decided — in a very small way — in favor of the family by finding the sheriff’s department 1 percent negligent. Finally, the jury awarded Hill’s relatives $1 for funeral expenses and $1 for each of Hill’s three children. That $4 was then reduced to 4 cents or 1 percent, representing the sheriff’s liability. The other 99 percent was blamed on the dead man, under a Florida law that enables such decisions if a victim was under the influence of alcohol.
The Hill family attorney called it a slap in the face. “You value someone’s life as one dollar?” Of course it’s not over. The family is appealing and going to the black robes with the grey hairs. University of Miami law professor Osamudia James says the option of nominal damages is given to juries as a way to acknowledge a wrong, even if they don’t believe large damages are warranted. It’s one tool juries are given to facilitate the difficult process of assigning monetary awards for injuries. “In cases like this with nominal awards, juries are saying ‘We don’t like what happened, but we’re not awarding a lot (of money) to it.” I personally got some questions about this one.
- If the weapon was found in his back pocket, and he immediately closed the garage door, how could he close the garage door facing away from it. When did they see the gun?
- They fired immediately after the garage door was closed. How do they know he wasn’t going to turn the music down after he closed the garage door?
- If they saw the weapon, why didn’t they shoot then? (That’s what they usually do to a black man with a gun.)
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m thinking with another lawyer, after its all said and done, they looking at ten to twenty million…
UpDate: The Hill’s lawsuit is still in the appeals stage. To date no money has been awarded. A GoFundMe page has been set up to aid his family.
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