Bhavani K. Raveendran

Victory Is Mine

Outside the Earle Cabell Federal Building in Dallas, Botham Jean's family sang a hymn. The hymn was "Victory Is Mine."

Three days of civil trial had ended. The jury had been out about three hours. Six years had passed since an off-duty Dallas police officer walked into the wrong apartment and killed Jean — twenty-six years old, sitting in his own home, eating ice cream — on September 6, 2018.

On November 20, 2024, the jury returned $98.65 million: $38.65 million in compensatory damages and $60 million in punitive damages. It found that the officer had acted under color of law, used excessive force, violated Jean's constitutional rights, and acted with malice or reckless indifference.

The family's lawyers had asked for $54,408,000. The jury nearly doubled it.

Bhavani Raveendran led the trial.

Three Days

Over three days, the plaintiffs had to establish the constitutional violation, Botham Jean's life, and the value of the loss. The single closing argument, split between two lawyers, took forty-five minutes.

The defendant did not appear. She did not send a lawyer either — her criminal defense attorney said she could not afford one — so the case was tried against an empty chair. There was no opposing account for a jury to reject, but the plaintiffs still bore the burden of proving the constitutional violation and damages.

Raveendran walked the jury through the sequence — the garage, the hallway, the doorway, the shooting, the 911 call — and argued that at every one of those moments the officer had thought first of herself and only afterwards of the man in front of her. The evidence came from the officer's own testimony in her criminal trial, from police-practice proof, and from the people who could say who Botham Jean was.

He had come from Saint Lucia, where he graduated at the top of his class in Castries, to Harding University and then to Dallas, where he worked as an accountant at PwC. He organized mission trips, started a school choir, and led worship at Dallas West Church of Christ. His family described a joyous extrovert whose voice filled rooms.

Everyone involved understood that the money would probably never arrive. Guyger was serving a ten-year sentence and had no assets; the judgment reaches any future book or film deal and not much else. Co-counsel for Jean's family put it plainly: how they would collect was never the important question. Holding her civilly liable was.

The verdict, Raveendran said afterwards, could not bring him back, but it gave his family some semblance of justice. Her co-counsel included Colton M. Johnson Taylor, Daryl K. Washington and Ben Crump. What the family collects, they intend for the Botham Jean Foundation, which supports children's homes and an elderly care facility in Saint Lucia.

They Called Him Perry

While leading the civil rights group at Romanucci & Blandin, Raveendran and Antonio Romanucci directed the team representing George Floyd's family.

His family called him Perry. They supplied what the video had obscured: the father, the brother, the friend, the athlete, the man his relatives spoke about with unmistakable affection.

Raveendran watched the recording of his death hundreds of times. The work was partly technical — connecting the duration of the restraint to the civil claims about training and municipal responsibility — and partly a problem of attention. The length of that restraint is what forces a viewer to stay inside Floyd's experience. Repetition is what makes a death start to seem ordinary. The civil case had to preserve the first without succumbing to the second.

One thought governed her approach: this cannot be another Emmett Till. Not another death witnessed by the entire country, followed by a promise of change that fades.

In March 2021 Minneapolis agreed to pay Floyd's family $27 million. Raveendran resisted the language of celebration. When people say congratulations, she has said, it feels empty. The settlement existed because a preventable death had occurred.

In the Floyd matter, Raveendran worked with several firms, experts, local counsel, and family representatives on the civil-rights case. The trial team later received the American Association for Justice's Leonard Weinglass in Defense of Civil Liberties Award.

Twenty-Two Minutes

Javier Ambler II was driving home in March 2019 when a Williamson County deputy tried to stop him for failing to dim his headlights. The pursuit ran for twenty-two minutes and ended on an Austin street. Deputies used Tasers while Ambler told them he had congestive heart failure, could not breathe, and was not resisting. "Save me," he said. He became unresponsive after he was handcuffed and died shortly afterwards.

A Live PD camera crew was riding along, filming. Their footage was never broadcast and was later destroyed. What survived was an Austin officer's body-camera recording, and it became evidence in the civil case.

Raveendran joined the team for Ambler's family. The complaint's central allegation was structural rather than personal: that a sheriff's office treating its own police work as television content had created incentives that contributed to a man's death.

Williamson County approved a $5 million settlement in 2021. Texas then passed Javier Ambler's Law, barring law-enforcement agencies from authorizing reality-television crews to accompany officers in the field.

In the remaining federal claims, the appellate court also kept open questions about continued restraint and an officer's opportunity to intervene.

One camera vanished. The other carried the encounter into court, and then into the statute book.

Face Down

Gloria Taylor called 911 in August 2016 because her husband, Steven, was suffering a diabetic crisis at their home in Milford, Illinois. He was confused, asking for orange juice, and needed medical help. The family presented evidence that an officer forced him face-down across a bed, pulled his arm behind him, and pressed him into the blankets. Steven said he could not breathe, vomited, and lost consciousness. He died ten days later.

The district court granted the officers qualified immunity, which would have ended the case without a jury ever hearing it. Raveendran argued the appeal in the Seventh Circuit in 2021.

At that stage, the court was required to credit the family's evidence, and genuine factual disputes belonged to a jury. The Seventh Circuit agreed, held that the family's account could support a finding of excessive force, and held that existing law had given fair warning against continuing to apply significant force to a subdued person in medical distress. The claim went back for trial.

Raveendran has since urged Congress to make state and local governments answerable for constitutional injuries their employees cause on the job, under the same ordinary rules of employer liability that apply to everyone else.

The Order on the Radio

Chicago Police Department rules restricted pursuits that began over property crimes. A sergeant came over the radio and told the officers to disengage.

They kept going — several more blocks, in an unmarked car, with no emergency lights and no siren. At 71st and Carpenter the minivan struck an SUV carrying Maria Carreon-Adame and her family to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Maria, thirty-seven and the mother of five children, died. Her relatives suffered fractures and internal injuries.

Raveendran served on the trial team, which reconstructed the sequence: when the order came, how much distance remained, and every decision made after the sergeant's instruction. In 2019 the jury returned $21.3 million against Chicago and the officers. Later that year the court approved a $19.25 million settlement resolving the post-trial proceedings.

Law Books on a Bullock Cart

Raveendran's understanding of law begins before the United States and before her own birth.

One grandfather joined the student movement for Indian independence, practiced labor law, negotiated with unions, and later worked to expand education in Kerala. The other was a family lawyer serving rural communities. He loaded his law books onto a bullock cart and carried counsel to the people who needed it.

Her parents moved to the United States and built lives centered on community work. The family name Warrier descends through a matrilineal line. For Raveendran the inheritance joined duty, protection, and a belief that legal training should travel toward need rather than wait for need to arrive at an office.

Practice

Raveendran took a political science degree with honors from Case Western Reserve University and graduated cum laude from American University's Washington College of Law in 2012.

In the International Human Rights Clinic her first clients included an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and she joined fact-gathering work concerning Haitian migrants in the Bahamas. A clinic partner remembered both her brilliance and the joy she brought to difficult work — cheesy jokes beside what he later called a righteous anger at injustice. After law school she completed a fellowship in human rights litigation at International Rights Advocates in Washington, then practiced as a municipal prosecutor and general civil attorney at Diamond & LeSueur in McHenry, Illinois, before joining Romanucci & Blandin in 2015. She was named partner in 2021.

Her appellate work includes a 2018 argument in the First District of Illinois in which the court held that the sexual abuse of a child cannot be treated as a de minimis injury, and two further Seventh Circuit wins in June 2023 as lead and contributing counsel. She has also represented the family of a teenage girl killed after being trafficked through an online classified-advertising site, in a wrongful death action against the site.

She has tried cases in state and federal courts, litigated in more than eighteen states, argued appeals, and testified before Congress. She now leads Raveendran Law LLC in Chicago, and travels regularly to Washington and Springfield to speak with legislators about pending law.