A once-$1 million verdict against two Philadelphia police officers is nearly gone, after a federal appeals court found punitive damages more than 60 times the compensatory damages awarded violate the U.S. Constitution’s Due Process Clause.
On April 22, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit vacated a jury’s award of $1 million in punitive damages to a woman who sued two Philadelphia police officers claiming the officers violated her civil rights as a result of injuries sustained during the woman’s arrest and her overnight detention.
The case arose in June 2019 after Tzvia Wexler got into a fight with officer Charmaine Hawkins near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.
According to the evidence at trial, Hawkins was riding her bike near the Pride parade in downtown Philadelphia on June 9, 2019, when she encountered Officer Hawkins, who was performing crowd control that day.
Trial testimony conflicted as to who started the fight – according to Wexler, Officer Hawkins shoved her into the crowd and, according to Officer Hawkins, Wexler used her bike to hit Hawkins – but what appears clear is that Wexler and Hawkins got into a “scuffle” that involved grabbing each other around the neck and, eventually, Officer Hawkins placing Wexler in a choke hold.
Wexler was arrested for disorderly conduct. Her request to be taken to a hospital was denied, and she was detained overnight instead.
After Wexler’s arrest, Detective James Koenig – the second defendant in the case – interviewed Hawkins and recommended adding charges of aggravated assault, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person, harassment, and possessing an instrument of crime – in this case, a bicycle. The charges were later dropped at a preliminary hearing.
Six months later, in December 2019, Wexler brought a federal civil rights case against the City of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Police Department, Hawkins, Koenig and a third officer. By the time the case went to trial over four years later, only Hawkins and Koenig remained in the case.
The five-day trial ended with a jury awarding Wexler $6,000 in compensatory damages — $4,000 attributable to Hawkins’ conduct and $2,000 attributable to Koenig – and a total of $1 million in punitive damages, apportioned evenly between Hawkins and Koenig.
The trial court later reduced the punitive damages award to $500,000 – again, evenly apportioned between the two defendants – and added over $290,000 in attorney’s fees.
On appeal, the Third Circuit threw out the claims of false imprisonment, false arrest and malicious prosecution against Koenig, finding that he was entitled to judgment as a matter of law since Wexler did not demonstrate that there was no probable cause for Koenig to recommend the five charges that were brought against Wexler.
In his opinion for a unanimous court, Judge Emil Bove, a former Trump Justice Department official, focused on the basic elements of the charged crimes and the evidence produced at trial supporting each, though he refused Wexler’s invitation to “autopsy the quality of the Department’s investigation.”
“Despite the fact that a bike is not a traditional criminal implement, Defendant Hawkins’ account gave rise to probable cause for the charge [of possessing an instrument of crime].” Wexler’s use of the bike to strike officer Hawkins, Bove wrote, “was not a manifestly appropriate use of Plaintiff’s two-wheeler.” Probable cause supported the other charges as well, the court found.
Having dismissed the claims against Koenig, the court turned to the issue of whether the punitive damages awarded against officer Hawkins were appropriate based on the jury’s finding of liability against her.
The court noted that the Supreme Court has laid out guidelines on determining whether punitive damage awards fit within the limitations of the Constitution’s Due Process Clause: those include “the reprehensibility of the conduct, the disparity between the actual or potential harm and the punitive damages award, and comparison to any existing statutory penalties for comparable conduct.”
The Court pointed out that the $1 million in punitive damages were, in part, influenced by the dramatic atmosphere created at trial. “During his summation,” Wexler’s attorney, Thomas Malone of The Malone Firm, “discussed slavery, the women’s suffrage movement, and the death of George Floyd.” And the district court’s post-trial analysis “was not exactly dispassionate either,” “[w]ith a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the non-sequitur comment that, ‘[i]ncreasingly, the citizens in our Nation have come to realize that they need not bend to the will of any police officer for any improper reason.’”
The Supreme Court has found a 4:1 ratio of punitive to compensatory damages “’might be close to the line of constitutional impropriety.’” The punitive damages awarded Wexler were 62.5 times the compensatory damages awarded.
“Removed from the drama, we conclude that $250,000 in punitive damages is constitutionally excessive. The punitives awarded to Plaintiff are ‘neither reasonable nor proportionate to the wrong committed,’” the court wrote.
In the court’s “best judgment,” the constitutionally appropriate ceiling for punitive damages against officer Hawkins was three times the compensatory damages, or $12,000.
Judgment against detective Koenig was reversed, the punitive damages against officer Hawkins were vacated and reduced to $12,000, and the award of more than $290,000 in lawyer fees was vacated and sent back to the district court to reconsider in light of the opinion.
