Hugh A. Eastwood
Civil Rights, Government Misconduct, and Constitutional Torts
You can’t lock up kids who’ve done nothing wrong.
Lincoln County Failed to Supervise Scott Edwards
The Adult Drug Court of Missouri’s 45th Judicial Circuit used a law-enforcement officer known as a tracker — one man with the authority to check curfews, enter participants’ homes, conduct searches and drug tests, report violations, and take participants into custody for sanctions. Scott Edwards, then a lieutenant in the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, did nearly all of it alone.
He used that authority to abuse women in the program. He later pleaded guilty to federal civil-rights offenses involving five women and received ten years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
Hugh Eastwood and co-counsel represented four of the women in a civil action against Lincoln County — and the case they built was about the silence around Edwards as much as the man himself. A multi-agency memorandum and procedures manual assigned the sheriff a monitoring role and contemplated joint home visits; the sheriff did not attend drug-court team meetings with Edwards, monitor his performance, or verify the time sheets he approved. Department rules requiring officers to report location and mileage during transports were never applied to tracker trips. Jail staff saw Edwards take incarcerated participants outside for unauthorized breaks. Drug-court team members heard the sexual comments and watched his attention settle on younger women. Everyone saw something. No one was responsible for seeing everything.
Eastwood pursued municipal liability under an objective deliberate-indifference standard. After a three-day trial, the jury found that the Lincoln County Sheriff, as a county policymaker, was deliberately indifferent to the obvious risk created by the failure to supervise Edwards. It awarded $750,000 to one plaintiff and $500,000 to each of the other three: $2.25 million. In 2017, the Eighth Circuit held that the evidence supported the verdict and affirmed the denial of a new trial.
Two Children, Two Jail Cells
Kadan and Brooklyn Rockett, ages twelve and fourteen, waited outside the courtroom during a Missouri custody proceeding involving their family. The proceeding did not name either child as a party. Associate Circuit Judge Eric Eighmy personally escorted them to jail cells in the Taney County courthouse, placed them — by their account — in separate cells, and returned about an hour later to ask whether they would now comply with his proposed arrangement.
Eastwood brought unconstitutional-seizure claims on their behalf. Eighmy asserted judicial immunity — the doctrine that shields judges for judicial acts — and in 2023 the Eighth Circuit held that personally escorting children to jail and acting as their jailer is not a function normally performed by a judge. The seizure claims proceeded to trial, and in 2025 a federal jury found that Eighmy unreasonably seized both children, awarding each $5,000. Eighmy appealed in No. 25-1664; the appeal was argued on January 14, 2026, and remains pending as of August 9, 2026.
The verdict put the judge’s conduct before a jury under the constitutional rules governing unreasonable seizure.
The Camera That Photographed the Wrong End of the Car
St. Louis mailed $100 red-light-camera notices to registered vehicle owners even though the photographs showed the rear of the vehicle — never the driver. The ordinance simply presumed the registered owner was behind the wheel unless the owner supplied satisfactory evidence otherwise, quietly inverting the burden of proof one traffic ticket at a time.
Eastwood and Bevis Schock challenged the ordinance for Sarah Tupper and Sandra Thurmond. The city dismissed the women’s pending prosecutions — but the Missouri Supreme Court allowed their requests for declaratory and injunctive relief to proceed, and on August 18, 2015, the court held the ordinance unconstitutional: its rebuttable presumption shifted the burden of persuasion to the accused and relieved the prosecution of proving the owner had been driving. The court affirmed an injunction against enforcement.
St. Louis dismissed pending cases and issued full $100 refunds to more than 56,000 people who had paid between February 11, 2014, and August 19, 2015.
After the Battering Ram
In 2014, a St. Louis SWAT team executed a search warrant at a family home; the residents maintained that police had relied on erroneous information about a neighbor two houses away. After officers used a battering ram and a flash-bang device, a city building inspector arrived under Project 87 — a municipal program routinely invoked after police searches — seeking signed consent to inspect the home. The only potential code violation he saw was a window broken during the search itself. The family alleged he warned that refusal could cost them their home.
Eastwood preserved the municipal-policy claim against St. Louis and carried it into mediation after remand. In 2018, the city agreed to pay $160,000 — and to amend Project 87 itself. Police would now need a particularized reason to suspect an immediate fire, health, or safety threat before requesting an inspection, and officials could no longer obtain consent by threatening immediate condemnation or removal. The amended policy governed future Project 87 inspection requests and consent practices.
From Ground Zero to the Eighth Circuit
Eastwood earned a B.A. with distinction in history and a J.D. from Yale. Before law school, he managed the site-design competition for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center — the international process, conducted under the world’s gaze, of deciding what should rise at Ground Zero.
He practices in St. Louis and serves as treasurer of the National Police Accountability Project. His practice includes government misconduct, unlawful detention, search and seizure, due process, and municipal liability. His cases have addressed failures of supervision, the limits of judicial immunity, unconstitutional burden shifting, and municipal search-and-inspection policy through jury verdicts, appellate holdings, and negotiated reforms.