Last month, the seven-year anniversary of Tony Timpa’s death came and went. Today, jury selection in the civil trial surrounding that death — which occurred after Dallas police violated their training when they held him on the ground for about 14 minutes — finally began, providing a striking example of the legal odyssey that alleged victims of government misconduct. , if they want a story.
Those seven years were filled with roadblocks set up by the government, almost robbing Timpa’s family of not only arguing their case before a jury, but also learning the basics of what happened on the evening of 10 August 2016, when Timpa called. 911.
That evening, Timpa told a dispatcher he was having a mental health crisis. He said he had schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety and that he had not been taking his medications. Two private security guards handcuffed Timpa and waited for the police.
They arrived shortly afterwards. For about 14 minutes and seven seconds, then-officer Dustin Dillard, who was promoted to senior corporal last year, pressed his left knee into Timpa’s back, pressed his left hand between Timpa’s shoulders and periodically placed his right hand on Timpa’s right shoulder. Timpa repeatedly called for help and screamed that he was ‘going to die’.
Finally he became silent. Because of the risk associated with the prone position, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) orders its officers to place subjects upright or on their sides as soon as resistance decreases. Instead, Timpa’s silence led Dillard to joke that he heard Timpa “snoring,” prompting Cpl. Raymond Dominguez and officer Danny Vasquez suggested that “scrambled eggs” and “tutti-frutti” waffles might wake Timpa from his sleep.
“You’re going to kill me,” Timpa had said. An autopsy revealed that he suffered ‘sudden cardiac death due to the toxic effects of cocaine and [the] physiological stress associated with physical disability.” He was 32.
Yet Timpa’s mother, Vicki, would not know for years what had happened to her son. It wasn’t for lack of trying.
After the DPD informed her that her son was dead, the police came up with different stories. The police told to her, Vicki said, that he had had a heart attack in a bar, or that he had fallen from his car, or that he had become unresponsive in an ambulance. None of these conflicting stories could be reconciled, nor could any of them adequately explain why Timpa had grass up his nose and bruises on his arms, which were visible on her son’s body when she went to the morgue.
Vicki subsequently filed a complaint against the police. But the department refused to give her the body camera footage, threatening her ability to effectively outline what happened and meet the minimum standard required to file such a lawsuit. The government subsequently decided to dismiss its complaint because it was not specific enough, despite the fact that it was the government that withheld the details.
“The idea behind this plausible plea standard is to give defendants notice of what is being alleged against them,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA and author of the book Sshielded: how the police became untouchable, told me earlier this year. “Well, the Dallas Police Department had all the knowledge in the world about what their officers had done, and yet they used this tool to try to get the case dismissed.”
It took three years before Vicki Timpa was able to watch her son die. In August 2019, a court ordered the DPD to release the footage, paving the way for Vicki to state in her lawsuit what the officers knew all along.
In a practical sense, that was just the beginning. In July 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas gave police qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that condemns lawsuits against state and local government actors if the alleged misconduct was not “clearly established” in a prior court decision. Timpa’s family has appealed Gutierrez v. United States City of San Antonio, a 1998 case in the same federal circuit in which police officers were denied qualified immunity after a man died while restraining him face down in the same manner. The man in that case was tied up, while Timpa was handcuffed and his feet tied with zip ties, which Judge David Godbey said. said was sufficiently anomalous to make it ineffective to notify Dallas officers.
That thin distinction illustrates how difficult it can be to overcome qualified immunity, with many courts requiring victims to find pre-existing precedent that essentially reflects their allegations. Such a statement often does not exist. But in a surprise decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit fallen over Godbey’s ruling in December 2021, denying the officers qualified immunity and clearing the way for Vicki to move on.
“It has long been well established within the Fifth Circuit that an officer’s continued use of force against a subdued and subdued subject is objectively unreasonable,” wrote Judge Edith Brown Clement. She also invoked specific DPD guidelines regarding the prone position, which officers appeared to ignore. Police can still enjoy qualified immunity even if they violate their own trainingwhich, however, mysteriously assumes that officers are more likely to read decades of case law than follow their own department’s policies.
The police then appealed again and asked the Supreme Court to intervene. This tactic is commonly used by government defendants, who have a bottomless coffer of taxpayer money to draw from. For example, William Virgil filed suit in 2016 over allegations that police accused him of murder; his conviction was overturned after he served 28 years behind bars. Although the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit turned down To grant qualified immunity to the officers involved, the government continued to make idle appeals. Earlier this year, the city of Newport, Kentucky, finalized a $28 million settlement, although Virgil won’t be able to benefit from it as he died in January 2022, after waiting years for the privilege of presenting his case before a jury.
In May 2022, almost six years after Timpa’s death, the Supreme Court will deliver its ruling turned down the government’s request to intervene. A trial was scheduled for July 2023. That was ultimately postponed after the chairman, Godbey – who authored the initial decision to grant the officers qualified immunity – reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with media coverage of the case.
So it wasn’t until today, more than 85 months after Timpa’s death, that Vicki, Timpa’s mother, finally saw the jury who will decide whether her family deserves redress for the actions police took that night. It’s a part of the race that many victims of government misconduct never see — and the process has barely begun.