You may have seen in the news, a federal jury in Michigan just awarded 4 million dollars to a man who got his eyeball squished like a grape, after being sucker-punched by a police officer for no reason. Daniel Reiff was on his way to a roofing job. He and his coworker, Ryan, stopped at Ryan’s house to get some tools. As they walked through the neighborhood, a neighbor got suspicious and called the police on a non-emergency number, reporting that she didn’t recognize two “younger looking kids.”
The Clinton Township police apparently didn’t have much going on that day, so they sent the cavalry – 8 police cruisers in total, who scrambled to the scene, even speeding and weaving through oncoming traffic, as if they were headed to a bank robbery. When Daniel saw this, having had prior bad experiences with the police, he left Ryan’s house and headed towards his bus stop. But Officer Broc Setty spotted him, got out of his car and chased him down, whooping a battle cry, as if he was a Viking about to murder some monks at a monastery. And actually Officer Setty wasn’t all that far off. When he caught up to Daniel, he sucker-punched him in the face, which ended up squishing Daniel’s eyeball like a grape, permanently blinding him.
The lawsuit:
The court order:
The jury instructions:
The jury verdict form:
