Bhavani K. Raveendran

The Song Outside the Courthouse

Bhavani Raveendran led the Botham Jean civil trial to a $98.65 million verdict, six years after Jean was killed in his own apartment.

Outside the federal courthouse in Dallas, Botham Jean’s family began to sing. The song was “Victory Is Mine.” Six years had passed since a Dallas police officer entered the wrong apartment and killed Jean while he sat in his own home. Three days of civil trial had just ended. The jury had deliberated for roughly three hours and returned with a number large enough to register the value of the life placed before it: $98.65 million.

Raveendran presented the family’s evidence concerning Jean’s life, the circumstances of the shooting, constitutional injury, and damages. The jury returned $38.65 million in compensatory damages and $60 million in punitive damages.

The Apartment Above

Botham Shem Jean had come from Saint Lucia 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. On September 6, 2018, he came home, changed clothes, watched football, and ate vanilla ice cream on his couch.

Guyger finished a thirteen-hour police shift and parked on the fourth level of the South Side Flats garage instead of the third. She walked past signs and fixtures belonging to a floor that was not hers, approached an apartment with a bright red doormat she had never owned, entered through the door, and shot Jean in the chest.

The criminal case ended in a murder conviction and a ten-year sentence. The civil jury faced a separate question: what legal responsibility followed from the constitutional injury, the life taken, and the choice to enter with a gun rather than summon help?

Raveendran’s opening gave the trial its line of sight. Guyger, she told the jury, had thought first of herself before she thought of Botham. Raveendran walked the jury through the garage, hallway, doorway, shooting, and 911 call to show how Guyger’s attention remained on herself rather than Botham Jean. The trial team used Guyger’s criminal testimony, police-practice evidence, apartment records, family witnesses, and the details of Jean’s work and faith. His sister described the brother who made friends everywhere. A Harding professor described the mission trips Jean began and the program that continued after him.

Guyger’s absence made the courtroom visually lopsided. Raveendran refused to let it make the evidence thin. The jury found excessive force, a violation of Jean’s constitutional rights, and malice or reckless indifference. It awarded $38.65 million in compensatory damages and $60 million in punitive damages—more than the family’s lawyers had requested.

Then the Jeans walked into the courthouse corridor and sang. A family known for music had answered a killing with a song, and the civil record finally carried the measure of what the apartment had contained before Guyger entered it.

The Name in the Inbox

George Floyd’s name reached Raveendran twice in May 2020. First it filled the television screen. Less than a day later, it appeared in her email inbox.

Raveendran was then leading the civil-rights group at Romanucci & Blandin. She and Antonio Romanucci directed a team of associates, clerks, a paralegal, and co-counsel working for Floyd’s family. The family called him Perry. They supplied the biography obscured by the final video: the father, brother, friend, athlete, and man whose relatives spoke about him with unmistakable affection.

Raveendran studied each second of the recording of Floyd’s death hundreds of times, working to keep repetition from making his death seem ordinary. The length of the restraint forced a viewer to remain with Floyd’s experience; the civil case had to preserve that human reality while tracing training, supervision, force, and municipal responsibility.

One thought governed her response: “This cannot be another Emmett Till.” The case could not become another nationally witnessed death followed by a fading promise of change. The legal team pursued a result with enough force to outlast the news cycle.

In March 2021, Minneapolis agreed to pay Floyd’s family $27 million. The number entered headlines, but Raveendran resisted the language of celebration. “When people say congratulations, it feels empty,” she said. The settlement existed because a preventable death had occurred. Its meaning lay in the accountability imposed, the family’s ability to direct resources toward healing and public work, and the warning delivered to agencies and organizations that might otherwise expect attention to move on.

The Floyd matter also revealed something essential about Raveendran’s practice. Large civil-rights cases often require several firms, experts, local counsel, and family representatives to move in concert. She welcomed that scale. The strongest team mattered more than preserving a single lawyer’s ownership of the case.

Javier Ambler II

Javier Ambler II was driving home in March 2019 when a Williamson County deputy attempted to stop him for failing to dim his headlights. The pursuit continued for twenty-two minutes and ended on an Austin street. Deputies used Tasers while Ambler said that 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 afterward.

A crew from the reality program Live PD had followed the deputies. The program never broadcast its recording, and the footage was later destroyed. An Austin officer’s body camera preserved what the entertainment production did not: Ambler’s condition, his pleas, the force, and the final minutes of the encounter.

Raveendran joined the family’s legal team. The complaint alleged that the sheriff’s decision to turn police work into reality television created incentives that contributed to Ambler’s death. Williamson County approved a $5 million settlement in 2021. Texas enacted Javier Ambler’s Law, barring law-enforcement agencies from authorizing reality-television crews to accompany officers in the field.

Ambler’s name now appears in state law. The body-camera recording also continued to matter in the remaining federal claims, where the appellate court kept open questions about continued restraint and an officer’s opportunity to intervene. One camera vanished. The other carried the encounter into court.

The Jury Restored

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. Officer Joseph Garrett arrived and, according to the family’s evidence, forced Steven 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.

Garrett described aggression and resistance. The district court accepted qualified immunity at summary judgment, ending the case before jurors could hear the conflicting accounts.

Raveendran argued that summary judgment required the court to credit the family’s evidence and leave genuine factual disputes to a jury. The Seventh Circuit reversed, holding that the family’s account could support an excessive-force finding and that existing law supplied fair warning against significant continued force on a subdued person in medical distress.

The Seventh Circuit sent the Taylor family’s claim back to the trial court. Raveendran later urged Congress to make state and local governments answer through ordinary employer liability when employees cause constitutional injuries in the course of their work. Her proposed rule came from the recurring reality of her cases: families confront an officer, but the officer acts inside a department that hires, trains, equips, supervises, and defends.

The Carreon-Adame Pursuit

Another Chicago case began with an instruction over police radio. Plainclothes officers were following a stolen minivan through the South Side. Department rules limited pursuits begun over property crimes, and a sergeant directed the officers to break off. They continued for several more blocks without emergency lights or a 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 that reconstructed the pursuit in Cook County. The order to disengage, the remaining distance, the unmarked car, and the collision formed a chain of decisions jurors could follow. In 2019, they returned a $21.3 million verdict against Chicago and the officers. Later that year, the court approved a $19.25 million settlement that gave the family finality and ended the post-trial proceedings.

In Raveendran’s cases, a defendant’s written rule or command often becomes evidence against the conduct that followed. The contrast gives jurors a concrete standard for evaluating responsibility.

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 combined duty, protection, and a belief that legal training should travel toward need rather than wait for need to arrive at an office.

She studied political science at Case Western Reserve University and earned her law degree at American University’s Washington College of Law. In the International Human Rights Clinic, her first clients included an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She also 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.

Raveendran has led state and federal trials, litigated in more than eighteen states, argued appeals, testified before Congress, and founded Raveendran Law LLC in Chicago. Her docket also includes representation of survivors of sexual assault and abuse, requiring careful treatment of trauma, policy-and-practice evidence, and causation.