Jury Awards Police Detainee $522K

By Thomas Breen, New Haven Independent

NEW HAVEN, CT — A federal jury has awarded a 29-year-old man $522,000 after finding that two city police officers negligently inflicted “emotional distress” on him after cops tackled him and then detained him in handcuffs and ankle shackles in police lockup in 2018.

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The jury delivered that verdict Thursday in the case Kijana Cornelius v. Ronald Pressley.

The trial began last Friday and concluded on Wednesday in the New Haven federal courtroom of U.S. Judge Janet Hall.

The jury found that Cornelius had proven his claims of “negligent infliction of emotional distress” — but not his claims of “excessive force” — against Officers Ronald Pressley and Nikki Curry. (Click here to read the full verdict.)

“I’m happy for my client,” Ron Johnson, one of Cornelius’s attorneys, told the Independent in a phone interview Friday. “My client is vindicated.”

In a separate phone interview on Friday, Mayor Justin Elicker said that he is still talking with the city’s attorneys “about our next steps,” including a potential appeal. He pointed out that two juries — one in February, one in May — both found “no excessive force” used by any of the officers involved in this incident. “We respectfully disagree” on the second jury’s finding of negligent emotional distress against Pressley and Curry.

Elicker pointed to the police department’s prior internal review that cleared all of the involved officers of any wrongdoing. According to his review of video evidence and associated reports, Elicker said, he believes officers “followed proper procedure.”

Thursday’s jury verdict marks the conclusion, for now, of a federal lawsuit first filed in 2020 about an incident that took place on April 22, 2018, in the New Haven Police Department’s detention center at 1 Union Ave.

Cornelius, then 21, had been arrested on a misdemeanor charge of breach of peace following a fight at Cody’s Diner.

As detailed in a description of the case included in the May 13 jury charge, Cornelius alleged that he “was subjected to excessive force and negligent infliction of emotional distress by Officer Pressley and Officer Curry who were in the intake room at the police station at the time he was taken into custody.”

Pressley and Curry denied Cornelius’ claims of wrongdoing and his request for compensatory and punitive damages, “asserting that the use of force was objectively reasonable in light of the circumstances.” They also accused Cornelius of being “contributorily negligent” and claimed that they were entitled to governmental immunity.

Pressley and Curry weren’t the only officers sued by Cornelius following this 2018 encounter. He also sued Officers Clayton Howze and Jose Luna.

However, at the end of a trial that took place in Hall’s federal courtroom in February, the jury — after deliberating for five days — returned a partial verdict in which they exonerated Howze and Luna. That jury was hung on the claims made against Pressley and Curry.

That led to the second trial this month, in which Pressley and Curry were the only remaining officers listed as defendants.

Ultimately, the jury sided with Cornelius on the “emotional distress” claims and awarded him a total of $522,000 damages. (In particular, they found that Cornelius had proven $435,000 worth of damages for his claim against Pressley and another $435,000 for his claim against Curry. That adds up to a total of $870,000. The jury then found that Cornelius was responsible for 40 percent of the “total negligence” of those two officers, thereby bringing the total award to 60 percent of $870,000 — or $522,000.)

The Cornelius trial happens to have taken place at the same time that a different federal jury in Hartford is hearing a civil-rights case brought by Stefon Morant, who has claimed that a former city police detective framed him and Scott Lewis for a 1990 double murder.

In his interview with the Independent on Friday, Johnson, one of Cornelius’s attorneys, stressed that his client wasn’t just taken down by officers in police lockup in 2018. The encounter lasted a total of 29 minutes; for much of that time, Cornelius was placed in “a prone position” with his hands and legs shackled.

Johnson has been with the case for four years. “We overcame summary judgment,” he said. Johnson also successfully argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for this case to go to trial. “I’ve been on this case fighting for a very, very long time.”

“No arrestee should ever have to go through what Kijana went through,” Johnson continued, “being in a prone position for well over 20 minutes,” handcuffed and with ankle shackles. “That young man has shown a lot of bravery to go up against these police officers.”

What does he hope the New Haven public takes away from this whole experience, including the jury’s most recent verdict? “American citizens will hold police officers accountable,” Johnson said. “They will.”

Local civil-rights attorney Alex Taubes, who represented Cornelius alongside Johnson in the latter months of this case, stressed that Pressley — who is now retired — was one of five officers later to be arrested for his conduct at police lockup on the night that 37-year-old New Havener Randy Cox suffered paralyzing injuries while in police custody in June 2022. (Late last year, Pressley agreed to a plea deal with state prosecutors that saw him avoid jail time and plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of second-degree reckless endangerment.)

“I think it’s important to note that the jurors [in the Cornelius trial] were not told that Ronald Pressley was involved in the Randy Cox situation,” Taubes said, even though the plaintiff tried to get that introduced as evidence. Ultimately, Judge Hall deemed it “inadmissible.”

“Randy Cox happened four years after this incident with Kijana,” Taubes said. “Maybe, if there had been some accountability sooner for officers in the detention center in New Haven, it wouldn’t have been such a catastrophic incident that occurred.”

Asked about Taubes’ connection of the Cox and Cornelius cases, Elicker said that these were “different incidents. They were unrelated.” (Elicker was not mayor at the time of Cornelius’s encounter with city police in April 2018; he was mayor at the time of Cox’s encounter with city police in June 2022.)

He added that, as evidenced by the police department’s Internal Affairs report at the time, city police found “no wrongdoing by [the] officers” involved in Cornelius’s case.

The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.