Justin T. Bamberg

Eight Shots Behind the Fence

Feidin Santana was walking to work on April 4, 2015, when he saw a North Charleston police officer chasing Walter Scott into a vacant lot. Santana raised his telephone. The camera captured Officer Michael Slager firing eight times as Scott ran away, then walking toward the man he had just shot. Five bullets entered Scott from behind.

The video contradicted the first official account. Slager had described a struggle over his Taser and later claimed Scott came toward him with it. Santana’s recording showed Scott unarmed and fleeing when Slager opened fire. It gave investigators, prosecutors, the family, and the public a fixed sequence that could be tested against every later statement.

Justin T. Bamberg joined the Scott family’s legal team as South Carolina counsel. He was twenty-eight, five months into his first term in the state House of Representatives, and still early in his plaintiff-side practice. The assignment was collective: Chris Stewart led a team that also included other lawyers representing Scott’s estate and four children. Bamberg’s place in it was close to the family, the local government, and the South Carolina agencies that would answer after the video became public.

North Charleston spared the family years of municipal-liability litigation. In October 2015, its City Council voted 10–0 to approve a $6.5 million pre-suit settlement. The payment resolved the civil claims; the criminal case and broader questions about the police department continued separately.

The Video against the First Account

Slager’s state murder trial ended in a mistrial in December 2016. Five months later, he pleaded guilty in federal court to willfully depriving Scott of the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable force. South Carolina agreed not to retry the state murder charge.

The federal court then had to determine the offense that governed sentencing. After a four-day hearing, the judge applied the guideline for second-degree murder and an enhancement for obstruction of justice. Slager received twenty years. The Fourth Circuit affirmed, holding that the sentencing court had not reversibly erred in finding malice and in treating Slager’s false statements to investigators as obstruction.

The family’s settlement, the federal plea, and the sentencing findings produced three distinct forms of accountability. The settlement provided for Scott’s children. The plea established a federal civil-rights offense, and the sentencing findings determined punishment. Santana’s video ran through each proceeding, while lawyers, investigators, prosecutors, judges, and the family carried it through different burdens of proof.

Three Stops per Shift

The Scott case also placed an ordinary traffic stop under scrutiny. Slager had stopped Scott because a brake light was not working. At a later bond hearing, Slager’s defense lawyer asserted that North Charleston officers were expected to make three stops during each shift. The city disputed that characterization and denied maintaining a quota.

The controversy over stop expectations became the basis for a prospective statewide rule. Bamberg used the dispute to help enact a statute governing every South Carolina law-enforcement agency.

He sponsored House Bill 4387 with lawmakers from both parties. Governor Nikki Haley signed it on June 9, 2016. Act 264 bars a law-enforcement agency from requiring an officer to issue a specified number of citations within a designated period. It does not forbid supervision. Departments may assess points of contact with residents and businesses and participation in community-oriented work. Employees reporting a violation receive the protection of the South Carolina Whistle Blower Act.

The statute therefore separated activity from punishment. An agency may expect officers to engage with the public. It may not turn the citation itself into a production quota. A disputed assertion made during the defense of one officer became a statewide limit on how future officers could be measured.

Two Cameras, Two Official Accounts

Six years after Scott’s death, police in Orangeburg responded to a report of a person with a gun. Clarence Gailyard was fifty-eight, unarmed, and carrying a walking stick. Rods and pins from an earlier injury made it difficult for him to lower himself quickly. Body-camera footage showed Officer David Dukes forcing Gailyard down with a boot to the head or neck while Gailyard was on his hands and knees.

Another officer, Aqkwele Polidore, refused to absorb the act into a shared police account. She de-escalated the encounter, contradicted Dukes, and reported what he had done. Orangeburg fired Dukes. State investigators charged him with first-degree assault and battery. The city paid Gailyard $650,000, apologized, and reviewed its police practices.

Bamberg publicly credited Polidore. Her report separated professional policing from Dukes’s conduct. One officer used the force; another preserved the truth about it. Dukes was charged with first-degree assault and battery. The civil settlement did not decide that criminal charge.

Travis Price’s case began with a different official narrative. In June 2021, Price approached a Rock Hill traffic stop to collect his brother’s belongings. An officer grabbed him, pushed him into a propane tank, took him to the ground, and arrested him for hindering police. The city then issued a statement portraying Price as belligerent and asserting that he bumped an officer.

Body-camera footage contradicted the release. The prosecutor dismissed the charge and said Price had done nothing wrong. Officer Jonathan Moreno was fired and apologized. A criminal jury later acquitted Moreno of misdemeanor assault and battery. Price’s civil action addressed another injury: the government had used its authority to publish an account that damaged the reputation of a man it should not have arrested.

Rock Hill paid Price $500,000 in 2023. Moreno paid nothing under the settlement. His acquittal and the city’s settlement are not inconsistent. The criminal jury decided the misdemeanor assault charge. The civil agreement resolved claims against the city arising from the arrest, the use of force, and the written account issued afterward.

Settlement and Changes to Police Rules

Alton Sterling was killed by Baton Rouge police in July 2016 outside the convenience store where he sold compact discs. Bamberg served on the team representing Sterling’s five children. The family’s civil action alleged excessive force, racial profiling, and failures of training and supervision.

The civil case ended differently. Baton Rouge approved a $4.5 million settlement, which the family accepted in 2021 before trial. The action was dismissed. Publicly identified policy changes called for de-escalation, verbal warnings before deadly force when feasible, a ban on chokeholds, and restrictions on firing into moving vehicles unless an imminent threat required it.

The agreement provided for Sterling’s children and changed written police rules. Its value lay in both forms of relief: support for the family and prospective rules governing future encounters.

The Camp, the Audit, and the Settlement

Del’Quan Seagers was sixteen when he collapsed and died at AMIkids Sand Hills, a private wilderness program operating within South Carolina’s juvenile-justice system. His mother, Shadeana Seagers, alleged that staff delayed the emergency response, including contacting managers before calling 911. She disputed the official explanation of her son’s death and accused the program of concealing what happened.

A legislative audit sharply criticized the Department of Juvenile Justice’s investigation and oversight. AMIkids denied responsibility and maintained that investigations had not established fault by the program or its overseers. Those positions define the dispute; neither can be silently converted into a finding.

Bamberg filed a wrongful-death and survival action. In January 2019, the federal court transferred the matter to Charleston County Probate Court so the proposed settlement could receive the approval South Carolina law requires. The federal judge retained jurisdiction to dismiss the action with prejudice after approval. The amount remained private, and no trial determined the contested facts.

The death moved through a legislative audit, executive scrutiny, civil litigation, and a court-supervised settlement without a finding of liability.

The Conservator’s Ledger

Hakeem Pinckney survived a 2009 vehicle crash with catastrophic injuries that left him quadriplegic and dependent on others to manage the compensation intended for his care. Alex Murdaugh acted as the family’s lawyer. Banker Russell Laffitte served as conservator. The positions carried fiduciary duties precisely because Pinckney could not protect the money alone.

Bamberg later represented members of the Pinckney family and other people whose settlements Murdaugh had stolen. He stood with Pamela Pinckney and Angel Gary at Murdaugh’s state sentencing. His work was victim representation; state and federal prosecutors brought the criminal cases.

In 2025, Laffitte admitted in South Carolina court that he and Murdaugh misappropriated $309,581.46 from funds held for Hakeem Pinckney and his estate.

Laffitte received five years in federal prison in September 2025. The next month, a South Carolina judge imposed a state sentence structure that included eight active years concurrent with the federal term, a suspended consecutive component, probation, community service, and $3,555,884.80 in restitution. Federal prosecutors stated that the victims had been made financially whole.

Murdaugh pleaded guilty to twenty-two federal financial crimes. In April 2024, the federal court sentenced him to forty years and ordered $8,762,731.88 in restitution and forfeiture exceeding $10 million. Those judgments converted years of concealed disbursements, false paperwork, and abused fiduciary authority into admitted crimes and enforceable financial obligations.

The criminal admissions establish that a conservator allowed $309,581.46 belonging to Hakeem and his estate to be stolen. They do not establish a $1.8 million Pinckney theft, and they do not establish how Hakeem later died. The narrower account is the accurate one.

The House Seat

Bamberg entered the South Carolina House in 2015 at twenty-seven and continues to represent District 90, now covering parts of Bamberg, Colleton, Dorchester, and Orangeburg Counties. He serves on the Judiciary Committee. For a client, he seeks relief under existing law. As a legislator, he can change the rule governing the next encounter.

He came to that work from a law-enforcement family. His father served as a police chief. His mother served in the military and later supervised major criminal investigations. His brother became a state trooper. Bamberg grew up knowing what it meant to wait for an officer in the family to return from a dangerous call.

Bamberg began practice representing insurers and corporate defendants before founding Bamberg Legal in his hometown. That experience helps him assess how agencies and companies defend cases, what a jury may hear, and when settlement makes sense. In civil-rights cases, he identifies what each officer did, tests official reports against the evidence, and determines when the government itself may be responsible.