SAN JOSE — A federal civil jury has awarded more than $1.3 million to a man who was injured by a police projectile at a George Floyd protest in the summer of 2020, concluding the first excessive force trial over the police aggression that garnered international scorn and changed the city’s protest response.
Kyle Johnson sued the city and San Jose police Officer James Adgar in 2021 on the contention that police violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights, and his civil rights, when Adgar fired a foam baton round at Johnson during a May 30, 2020 demonstration in downtown San Jose over the notorious killing of Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.
The protests lasted for more than a week and at one point prompted the city to institute, then revoke, a night curfew in an attempt to quell unrest. But the most significant fallout came from a violent police response that saw officers deploy tear gas, flash-bang grenades and foam and rubber projectiles to break up crowds, which have since been either heavily restricted or banned from being used solely for crowd control.
The jury award handed down Wednesday evening amounts to $1,353,000, and the city will additionally have to pay the plaintiff’s lawyer fees. Jurors found the city liable for First and Fourth Amendment violations, state civil-rights violations, battery and negligence against Johnson. They rejected a claim that would have held police department policies and practices liable for his injuries.
“He was doing nothing more than exercising his constitutional rights and he should never have been harmed,” said Abimael Bastida, Johnson’s lead attorney and a partner with the San Jose law firm McManis Faulkner. “It validates and confirms what we had initially brought to the city, that Mr. Johnson’s rights were violated, and he was entitled to damages.”
The San Jose City Attorney’s Office, which defended the city and Adgar, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Johnson’s lawsuit joins other notable federal civil-rights litigation against the city on behalf of injured protesters. A lawsuit from several people injured during the protests, including a bystander who lost his eye to a police projectile, was settled in 2023 for $3.3 million.
Trial is pending, and set to start in May, for another multi-plaintiff lawsuit headed by activist and former police trainer Derrick Sanderlin, who was seriously injured after a police officer shot him in the groin the day before Johnson’s injury happened.
That lawsuit was held up for a year while the city appealed a district judge’s decision to deny qualified immunity to the officer who shot Sanderlin, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s ruling. Qualified immunity is a legal protection that shields government employees from litigation over work actions absent a clear violation of constitutional or statutory rights.
In the wake of the protests, the police department acknowledged that most of the officers on scene “lacked the sufficient training and experience” with crowd control.
Johnson stated in his lawsuit that he participated in the second day of downtown demonstrations, and contends that protesters were peaceful when police officers “began to deploy weapons” after someone in the crowd threw a plastic water bottle in the air. He recalls running toward City Hall when Adgar fired a foam baton round at him, hitting him in the back of his leg.
The city clashed with Johnson over whether he had gotten to the protest site before or after police declared an unlawful assembly and ordered people to disperse. The city has asserted that Johnson was shot amid chaos during which police officers manning a skirmish line were fending off bottles and rocks being thrown at them.
Johnson claimed that the round that hit him inflicted a large circular bruise on the back of his leg and caused a blood clot to form, and increased his risk for additional blood clots, diminishing what had been prior to that point an active lifestyle.
“He’s definitely still dealing with the effects of that injury, and he will continue to receive medical treatment,” Bastida said. “This award will help him pay for that treatment.”