$45 Million New Haven Settlement for Randy Cox, Paralyzed in the Back of a Police Van, the Largest Police-Misconduct Settlement in U.S. History

On June 19, 2022, New Haven police arrested 36-year-old Richard "Randy" Cox on a weapons charge that was later dropped and placed him, handcuffed and without a seatbelt, in the back of a police transport van. When the driver braked hard to avoid a collision, Cox was hurled headfirst into the metal partition at the front of the van. The impact broke his neck. What happened next made the case a national story: instead of treating the crash as the medical emergency it was, officers at the detention center accused Cox of being drunk and faking his injuries, dragged him from the van by his feet, and put him in a holding cell before he was finally taken to a hospital. He emerged paralyzed from the chest down.

The episode, captured on video, drew immediate comparisons to the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in a Baltimore police van. Cox's family retained Ben Crump, who brought the case together with Connecticut attorneys Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber. The legal team filed a $100 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of New Haven and the officers involved, arguing that the city's failure to secure detainees with seatbelts, and the officers' callous response to a man with a broken neck, amounted to deliberate indifference.

Criminal and disciplinary consequences ran alongside the civil case. Five officers involved in Cox's transport and booking were charged with misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment and cruelty, and New Haven's Board of Police Commissioners fired officers over their treatment of Cox. The city also changed its prisoner-transport policies in the aftermath.

In June 2023, barely a year after the injury, the parties announced a $45 million joint settlement, a figure Cox's lawyers described as the largest police-misconduct settlement in United States history, eclipsing the $27 million Minneapolis paid in the George Floyd case, which Crump had also negotiated. Roughly $30 million of the payment was covered by the city's insurance, with the city responsible for the remainder, and New Haven's Board of Alders subsequently approved the city's funding plan.

For Cox, who now requires round-the-clock care, the settlement funds a lifetime of medical treatment and support. For the broader legal terrain, the case reset the ceiling for police-misconduct recoveries involving a surviving victim, demonstrating that catastrophic-injury cases, with decades of future care ahead, can command sums beyond even the highest-profile wrongful-death settlements.