Adanté Pointer

A fight inside La Victoria Taqueria in downtown San Jose, early on March 27, 2022, had produced a gun, and Green — a 2019 graduate of Oakland's McClymonds High who went on to play college football — took it from the man who drew it. Then he backed toward the front door, the gun in his left hand pointed at the ceiling, propping the door open and keeping the others back with his right hand.

Officer Mark McNamara, responding to a fatal shooting nearby, came up with at least four other officers. He opened fire within three seconds of the first command: five shots from a few feet away, as Green was turning, lowering the gun and raising an open palm. Four hit Green.

The restaurant's security camera and the officers' body cameras recorded it.

Adanté Pointer built the case out of those seconds and out of what came after them. Investigators later found racist text messages McNamara had sent, some in the hours after the shooting, about Green and about Pointer; McNamara resigned in November 2023. The trial court denied him qualified immunity, and on September 9, 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed: "Police officers do not act reasonably when they shoot an armed individual who is surrendering." In January 2026 the San Jose City Council approved an $8 million settlement, an amount that reflected, Pointer said, "the egregiousness of this particular police officer." California disqualified McNamara as a law enforcement officer, and the Santa Clara County District Attorney dismissed several cases he had worked on.

Eight Boxes of Cereal

Pointer and his older sister Keesha went to a 300-student Catholic school in Piedmont, a few miles from their home in West Oakland. They got in on the recommendation of a wealthy family in the parish.

Their great-grandmother was that family's housekeeper.

He was one of a handful of Black students at the school, and one of the few whose family was not affluent. In the first grade he went home with a classmate, and in the cupboard there were eight boxes of cereal.

"That blew my mind," Pointer has said. "We had one box at home, and we had to mete it out."

He wanted to know what his friend's father did for a living. He was an attorney.

Pointer's grandparents had come to California from Mississippi and Texas looking for a better life. His grandfather, Roddie Proctor, was a carpenter who bought houses and fixed them up, and while other children watched Saturday cartoons Pointer was sweeping those properties and running errands for the business. The family always had enough. In Oakland, his neighbors stood in lines for food. "My classmates only saw that on the news," he has said. "I was living it."

He learned the other difference early, in cars. Riding with friends from the neighborhood, everyone's name was run, everyone was put in handcuffs, the car was searched. Riding with his white classmates, the police gave warnings.

He studied political science at UC Berkeley, worked a summer on Capitol Hill, and worked for Representative Ron Dellums and then Representative Barbara Lee, staying with Lee's office through law school at UC Law San Francisco. He considered running for office himself. A Berkeley policy professor settled it: you can become a politician after being a lawyer, but it is very hard to become a lawyer after being a politician.

Dusk in a Vacant Lot

In 2003, studying for the bar exam at home in West Oakland, Pointer had his front door open behind a security screen when he heard the fence rattle in the vacant lot next door, and then someone calling out in pain.

It was dusk. He could see flashlights, and two silhouettes standing over a person on the ground, kicking.

He yelled. The beating stopped. He watched the officers handcuff the man, put him in their car, and drive away. He could not identify any of them, and he did not know what to do.

Two weeks later the man knocked on his door. Pointer sent him to John Burris. "I didn't really know everything Burris did," he has said, "but I knew he dealt with the police."

He Chased Me Down

A year or so later, Barbara Lee asked Pointer whether he had ever thought about becoming a civil rights attorney — and whether he knew John Burris.

Pointer had been thinking about the man he sent to Burris's office. He started emailing. He kept emailing. Nothing came back.

Then he saw Burris's car at a stoplight and pulled alongside.

"He chased me down," Burris has said. "He chased me down on the street, pulled me over, and said he wanted to work for me."

Burris hired him as a law clerk — he had finished law school but had not yet passed the bar — and then put him on nearly every case that came through the office, where he could often outsmart opposing counsel. "He could see between the lines pretty easily," Burris has said. "Much of the work is gray areas, and in cases where the opposition is strong, you have to have some moxie." Pointer, he added, "had a great knack for that."

He stayed fifteen years. The lesson he says has guided his entire career came from Burris, and it is one sentence: you have to have an unyielding belief that you can win, and that you're right.

January 1, 2009

Pointer woke on New Year's Day, turned on the news, and watched cellphone video of a BART officer shooting Oscar Grant as Grant lay face down on a station platform.

The case became, he has said, a four- or five-year journey. He took the depositions, ran the written discovery, prepared the witnesses, and argued against more experienced lawyers. He was also the family's point of contact, and he coached them on speaking to the media. BART paid Grant's family $2.8 million in 2011.

Wanda Johnson, Grant's mother, now runs the Oscar Grant Foundation. Her family pushed Burris's office to advocate for her son in the streets as well as in court. Johnson has said that Pointer was there at the vigils after her son was killed, and later at the galas and panels. Years later, she can still call him. He answers: Yeah, Mama Wanda, whatever you need.

Pointer has described the civil case as a family's one chance at justice, and often the only way they learn what happened to their loved one. There are very few criminal prosecutions, he has said, and officers are rarely disciplined or fired; the other legal channels are out of the family's hands. He calls himself a civil prosecutor.

The Cases That Followed

Ronell Foster was riding a bicycle in Vallejo on February 13, 2018, when Officer Ryan McMahon tried to stop him for riding in what police called an unsafe manner. It ended with Foster tased, struck with a flashlight, and shot several times in the back. The case settled for $5.7 million. In February 2019 McMahon was among six Vallejo officers who fired 55 shots in about three and a half seconds at Willie McCoy, twenty years old and asleep in his car at a Taco Bell drive-through; that case settled for $5 million. The litigation, Pointer's firm has said, exposed a police gang within the department, and in 2020 a practice came to light in which Vallejo officers allegedly bent their badges after on-duty killings.

Elena Mondragon was sixteen and pregnant when plainclothes Fremont officers shot and killed her as she rode in a car. In June 2022 a federal jury awarded her family $21 million.

The family of Miles Armstead, killed by a neighbor in 2020 after he had repeatedly reported the man's threats to Oakland police, settled for $2.4 million. In 2012 Pointer represented more than 10,000 people in a class action against Chevron over the fire at its Richmond refinery.

He has been on the other side of a traffic stop himself. In December 2017, Oakland officers pulled him over because, they said, his car fit the description of one connected to an earlier shooting; they ordered him out at gunpoint, made him crawl backward along the ground under threat of being shot, handcuffed him, and searched the car. He talked his way out safely and told them he was an attorney. Then he sued — and then he made the stop into a short film, Dead Right, which he uses to educate the public.

Maurice Monk

Maurice Monk was forty-five. In June 2021 he was charged with a misdemeanor for not wearing a mask on a city bus; that October, after he missed a court date, he was taken into custody at Santa Rita Jail, unable to pay $2,500 bail. He lived with high blood pressure, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, and he was in the care of the jail's staff and its medical contractor. He had not left his cell in weeks. Food trays stacked up. His pills were on the floor. Another man in the unit, helping distribute meals, asked the guards whether they were just waiting for him to die.

Monk was dead on his bed for days before anyone noticed; he was found on November 15, 2021. His family was told it was a heart attack.

Pointer and his colleagues read roughly fifteen thousand pages and watched hundreds of hours of video to establish what had actually happened. Body camera video showed deputies and nurses opening his cell door for several days without going in or checking on him. He had been in one position long enough that the ink from his shirt transferred onto the bedding.

Alameda County agreed to pay $7 million and to reform its training for jail deputies, and in June 2025 the jail's medical contractor, Wellpath, agreed to pay $2.5 million, bringing the total to $9.5 million. The sheriff changed how welfare checks are conducted, and deputies' rounds are now tracked with electronic key cards in place of handwritten logs.

"Nobody wants to believe that if you go to jail for a nonviolent crime, if you're just in there because you're poor, that you're going to be treated as less than," Pointer has said. "But this happens every day in our country."

Joseph Sample's Truck

Joseph Sample drove a ready-mix concrete truck for Cemex from 2017 to 2022. He is Black, was born with a hearing disability and walks with a limp, and coworkers subjected him to near-daily slurs and disability-based harassment. He reported it to management again and again, and he complained to human resources.

His trial began on March 23, 2026, before U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick in San Francisco. A former driver and shop steward testified that he had often heard coworkers mock Sample's disability with a slur. On March 31 a unanimous nine-member jury found that Sample had faced a hostile work environment and awarded him $5 million. "They had no right to abuse, taunt, mock and demean Mr. Sample," Pointer said.

Lawyers for the People

Pointer founded Pointer & Buelna in Oakland in June 2020. He has represented, he says, "every nationality, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation," and he describes the work as taking the side of justice. He speaks in Oakland schools and churches about people's rights during police encounters, and his firm funds a $10,000 scholarship for a student dedicated to helping underprivileged people and the community.

Asked what he tells young trial lawyers, he gives two answers. Take every chance to try a case, because there are fewer opportunities to get into a courtroom and perfect the craft than there used to be. And be yourself: "your quirk, whatever your personality is, that is your superpower." The lawyers remembered as "the legends of the bar," he has said, for the most part have something that sets them apart — the way they dress, the way they talk, their cadence — and all of it is their authentic self. "Being your authentic self is how you connect to a jury."