After William Hope Jr. was killed during an altercation with two Chicago police officers in 2010, a jury sent the police department a stern message, awarding the man’s family $4.5 million.
That was for compensatory damages, paid for by city taxpayers. But the jury went a step further and ordered the two officers, Armando Ugarte and Michael St. Clair II, to each personally pay $10,000 in punitive damages to Hope’s estate.
It was a rare penalty that juries in civil lawsuits often reserve for particularly egregious cases of police misconduct.
But the officers never had to pay. Instead, their lawyers, who also work for the city, and the plaintiff’s attorneys negotiated away the damages.
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In case after case, a Tribune analysis of court records found, the state law that requires officers to pay punitive damages in civil lawsuits is routinely undercut by negotiations absolving them of the penalties.
Of the nearly $1.1 million in punitive damages awarded in police misconduct verdicts the city has paid to resolve since 2009, the Tribune found that Chicago police officers were ultimately responsible for nearly $285,000, an analysis of court records shows.
To legal experts, that only undermines the law’s intent, which is not only to punish individual officers but also to deter their peers from engaging in similar misconduct.
But for officers, the fact that some of the awards do stand shows that they can be exposed financially. . The fear of having to pay, they say, can have a crippling effect on their willingness to do police work.
City lawyers say that they are simply doing their job and are fulfilling their ethical and legal obligation to defend police in lawsuits related to their work.
"Our job is not to seek to punish the officers," said Liza Franklin, a veteran City Hall lawyer who defended Ugarte and St. Clair in the Hope case. "Our job is to do the best thing we can for our clients."
Even when officers are in jail or have been fired for misconduct, court records show that the city’s lawyers have continued to appeal the court penalties.
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Franklin said that a number of government agencies and offices, including the Independent Police Review Authority, the Bureau of Internal Affairs and, ultimately, the state’s attorney’s office are charged with handling disciplinary matters for police misconduct.
Some of the officers who have not had to pay punitive damages have recently been sued more than the vast majority of the police force. Among them is Ugarte, who has been named in 10 misconduct lawsuits since 2009. The city has paid damages in more lawsuits involving Ugarte, a narcotics officer, than any other officer on the police force during that time, a Tribune analysis of court records found.
The police department declined to make Ugarte or St. Clair available for comment.
The findings come in the wake of a recently released federal Justice Department report that found Chicago’s Law Department, at times, provides legal cover for a flawed police department. The department has been sanctioned eight times under Mayor Rahm Emanuel for withholding possible evidence in police misconduct lawsuits.
Jeffrey Granich, a lawyer who has for years represented plaintiffs in police misconduct cases, said that in his experience city lawyers do "everything humanly possible to keep cops from paying."
He and other plaintiffs’ lawyers whose clients have won recent punitive damages say that the city will typically offer incentives for plaintiffs to reach a deal and eliminate or reduce the punitive damages. Examples of those incentives include agreeing to cover attorney fees, not appealing verdicts or seeing that plaintiffs are quickly cut checks.
Franklin said that city resources are not bargained away on behalf of officers. The Law Department often successfully negotiates down attorney fees and compensatory damages, Franklin said. She added that the city has some leverage, too.
For Chicago police, punitive damages don’t often last
For Chicago police officers accused of misconduct, punitive damages awarded by juries often are negotiated away.
For Chicago police officers accused of misconduct, punitive damages awarded by juries often are negotiated away.
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"They talk about (how) they hold this over our heads. Well, they don’t have to settle," Franklin said, referring to lawyers representing plaintiffs, "and we will file appeals and do what’s appropriate, and they can wait two years for their money."
But the result, some legal experts say, is the same — a potentially significant deterrent to officers engaging in future misconduct is given up.
"The officer is never feeling the heat," said Locke Bowman, a law professor and executive director of Northwestern University’s Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, "and that’s the person whose conduct you are hoping to change."
Seldom awarded
In Chicago, punitive damages were awarded in 35 of roughly 200 police misconduct lawsuits that ended with a jury verdict in the nearly eight years’ worth of court and Chicago Law Department records analyzed by the Tribune.
Of those, the punitive damages stood in 14 of the cases. In another case, negotiations over the damages are ongoing, according to the Law Department, and in three more it’s unclear if the officer paid.
The nearly $285,000 in punitive damages for those 14 cases amounts to a token penalty when compared to the more than $350 million that the city has paid overall to resolve the roughly 1,300 civil lawsuits in police misconduct cases over the same time period. The vast majority, roughly 85 percent, are settled before trial; and there were rare instances where punitive damages are awarded in those cases as well.
In the smallest award, the officers’ share was fairly painless when a jury in 2011 ordered three of them to split $7 worth of punitive damages in an excessive force lawsuit filed by a man who was kicked repeatedly while handcuffed during an arrest.
In the most expensive punitive damages award by a jury, Richard DeFelice, an officer who is now retired, was ordered to pay $250,000 in an excessive force lawsuit that alleged he coerced a false confession from a man at a North Side police station by punching him repeatedly in the face.
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The 28-year-old was taken from lockup to the hospital where he was found to have a broken nose and rib, according to court records. The injuries did not go unnoticed by a judge, who ordered pictures taken of his beaten face and body.
DeFelice denies that he was involved in the beating. Rather, he contends, he was singled out. Initially, other officers were named in the lawsuit, but they were dismissed by the time the jury began reviewing the evidence.
"All of a sudden, they were staring at one guy," DeFelice said. "They looked at me and I knew we were starting on a bad note."
Ultimately, his penalties were reduced to $90,000 during negotiations after the trial; he said he refinanced his house to free up money but is still paying it off, with interest.
That amount was higher than most of the punitive damage awards reviewed by the Tribune, which averaged around $20,000 in lawsuits that included a variety of allegations from excessive force to failing to provide medical attention and false arrest. In one case, an officer himself won a punitive damages award when he alleged that he was wronged by another officer.
City lawyers say that they have an ethical and legal obligation to vigorously defend any city employee sued for their conduct on the job. In some cases, the officers are represented by private attorneys who reach the agreement.
That included the members of a disbanded tactical unit, known as SOS, who were convicted of crimes or fired by 2014 when punitive damages were being negotiated down by city lawyers in one lawsuit from $56,000 to $7,500, court records show.
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Once allegations of misconduct are no longer work-related, the defense stops. When DeFelice, for example, was accused of fraudulently moving his assets to avoid paying a judgment, city lawyers abandoned an appeal.
Ultimately, he wasn’t left entirely on his own; the police union hired him a lawyer. The president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Dean Angelo Sr., did not respond to requests for comment.
The fact that officers do, in some cases, have to pay shows that they are not given carte blanche, according to the city attorney Thomas Platt.
And all punitive damages, even the reduced ones, hit officers hard, Platt said.
"They get wage-reduction orders," he said, and "they don’t like it."
DeFelice said it’s not just officers who end up hurt. The damages hurt morale, he said, and contribute to less aggressive policing.
"You get paid the same money whether you stop and arrest someone or not," he said, adding that officers then say, "I’m not going to go the extra mile if I’m not going to get the backup."
Meant to deter
The law requiring officers to pay punitive damages themselves has been around for more than a century, and is common around the country.
It is standard practice to negotiate down punitive damages, according to Joanna Schwartz, a law professor from the University of California, Los Angeles.
"Officers are virtually always indemnified even if they have been disciplined, terminated or criminally prosecuted as a result," Schwartz wrote in a study released in 2014 where she examined data from 44 of the nation’s largest police departments between 2006 and 2011.
Legal experts say it is important that lawyers representing the city have the ability to negotiate after the verdict is handed down, including if punitive damages are awarded.
"Honest officers can make mistakes and a jury can make arbitrary decisions," he said. "We have to protect against that," said Mark Iris, a lecturer at Northwestern University who has studied punitive damages and, for two decades, was the executive director of the Chicago Police Board.
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And there are other reasons that punitive damages don’t stick. In some cases, they have unraveled when a judge found that officers played a negligible role. In others, plaintiffs dropped their petitions for fines when it was clear that the officer didn’t have money to pay.
But if punishment for troubled officers is routinely blunted, Iris said, there is danger in lending an air of impunity and "the deterrent effect goes down the toilet."
Members of the jury in the Hope case recently told the Tribune that they were well aware that the officers would have to pay punitive damages. They said they were concerned with striking a balance between supporting the officers in their dangerous job while holding them accountable for misconduct.
When the facts of the case pointed to over-aggressive policing, some jurors insisted that Ugarte and St. Clair should share the financial pain. They then struggled over how much was enough to punish the officers for their role in the young man’s death without crippling them financially.
"It gave them a message to stop and think before being active with a gun," a juror, Robert Mugnaini, said.
But in Ugarte’s case, it’s not clear that the punitive damages had any effect.
While St. Clair has not been named in a lawsuit since, Ugarte’s legal problems have continued.
Since the verdict in the Hope case, Ugarte has been named in six additional lawsuits — bringing his lawsuit tally to 11 since he was first sued in 2008.
And he has continued to face civil judgments that have cost taxpayers nearly $5 million in damages since he was hired a little more than a decade ago.
He hasn’t paid anything.
acaputo@tronc.com
@AngelaTCR
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