Beth G. Baldinger

Eight Years

On June 12, 2014, Xavier Ingram was twenty years old and walking to a liquor store.

Camden County police officers were sweeping the apartment complex on foot. Ingram met a friend inside the store, and when they came out, two officers approached.

He ran. He had an outstanding motor vehicle summons and did not want to be arrested over it.

Seconds later he was on the pavement with a spinal-cord injury that left him unable to move his arms or legs.

The officers said he slipped on wet ground and landed on his head before anyone reached him. Ingram said an officer tripped him, another put a knee or a foot on his neck, and they held him down while he told them he could not feel his limbs. Surveillance video captured the chase and the fall. It did not settle what happened after.

That gap — between a man hitting the ground and a man being held on it — was the entire case, and Beth Baldinger spent eight years inside it.

She filed on September 4, 2014. The medical question was whether the damage in Ingram's neck came from an unaided fall or from force applied afterwards, and answering it took medical experts, eyewitnesses, the video, and the officers' own competing accounts.

There was a second front. Police had said Ingram was carrying drugs and a stolen gun. He denied the gun. At trial Baldinger put on evidence that the drugs had been planted, and the county dropped every criminal charge against him.

Four Weeks and a Deadlocked Jury

Trial began in the District of New Jersey on February 28, 2022. Ingram was brought from his nursing home and testified from a hospital bed placed in the courtroom.

For four weeks Baldinger put on the fall, the restraint, the anatomy of the injury, and what each officer did in the moments after. On March 29 the jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked, and the court declared a mistrial.

The judge asked a magistrate judge to mediate. Camden County offered $10 million, and in May 2022 the case ended in settlement.

Baldinger called it an eight-year epic battle and a tremendous acknowledgment. Ingram had his day in court, she said, looked the jury in the eye, and told his truth.

She had also described the case, from early on, in words that took years to become common currency: this was George Floyd's circumstances years before George Floyd.

What the Money Was For

Ingram had four children. For years he lived in a nursing home and saw them over FaceTime.

The settlement, remitted in August 2022, paid for the care and equipment that let him leave. He went home. He spends time with his children, works on business ventures, and reads.

The American Association for Justice gave Baldinger its Leonard Weinglass in Defense of Civil Liberties Award in 2023. She was assisted throughout by Cory Rothbort and Trevor Dickson.

A Test Result Nobody Acted On

Ryne Dougherty was sixteen, a junior and a linebacker at Montclair High School. After a concussion he took an ImPACT neurocognitive test and did poorly on it.

The result did not stop him from playing.

His family's case was that the return-to-play safeguards existed, that the test was the mechanism designed to catch exactly this, and that he went back into contact football without complete medical clearance.

He collapsed during a junior varsity game on October 13, 2008, and died two days later of a brain hemorrhage.

Baldinger took the case to the edge of trial. The parties settled for $2.8 million in September 2013, shortly before jury selection.

The Right to a Jury

Mary Brennan's husband struck her in February 1994, causing a forehead laceration that required hospital treatment. She filed for divorce, and she also filed a separate tort action and demanded a jury.

The Family Part consolidated the two and denied her the jury — the ordinary result, since matrimonial matters are tried to a judge. The Appellate Division reversed, and Baldinger was counsel on Brennan's briefs in the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The Court held that where the public policy against domestic violence outweighs the other issues in a matrimonial action, a marital tort claim should be tried to a civil jury if the victim asks for one. The Family Part may empanel that jury itself or send the tort claim to the Law Division.

The effect is durable and simple: a claim for bodily injury does not lose its jury because the person who caused the injury was married to the plaintiff.

Practice

Baldinger is a partner at Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman in Roseland, New Jersey, in a career now approaching forty years, and has been recognized in the field of crime victims' rights for a quarter century.

Her clients are people injured by organizations that were supposed to be protecting them — children hurt in foster care and daycare, survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, estates in homicide cases, people whose civil rights were violated by police. She has also brought a series of cases for families who lost someone in psychiatric and residential treatment settings, arguing that facilities entrusted with people in crisis are answerable for failures of supervision; one such matter resolved for $4.375 million.

Her earlier results include a $10 million jury verdict for failure to provide police protection, brought for a young child severely burned when an incendiary device was thrown into his family's apartment. The trial judge reduced the award to $2.4 million, and it was affirmed on appeal.

She works in individual actions, class actions and multidistrict litigation, and lectures nationally on victims' rights. She earned a B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany and a J.D. from the University of Miami, and is admitted in New Jersey, New York, the District of New Jersey, the Southern District of New York, and the United States Supreme Court.