Justin T. Bamberg

The Walter Scott Representation

On April 4, 2015, a bystander named Feidin Santana raised his phone and recorded North Charleston police officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott. The recording contradicted the first official account of the encounter: it showed Scott unarmed and running away when Slager fired. At a news conference after the footage became public, Bamberg framed the evidentiary stakes in a single question: “Where would we be without that video?” Santana's recording gave the Scott family something rare in a disputed police shooting — a fixed sequence of events against which the officer's account, the city's response, and the later federal prosecution could each be measured.

Justin T. Bamberg joined the family's legal team as South Carolina counsel and represented the Scotts in their negotiations with North Charleston. Atlanta lawyer L. Chris Stewart, who led the team, later recalled landing in South Carolina at two in the morning and finding Bamberg already prepared to meet the family. “I literally called, and he hopped in the car,” Stewart said. From the first hours of the case, Bamberg was the lawyer physically closest to the family and to the city officials who would have to answer for what the video showed. In October 2015, the North Charleston City Council voted 10–0 to approve a $6.5 million pre-suit settlement for Scott's family.

Slager later pleaded guilty in federal court to willfully depriving Scott of the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable force. After a four-day sentencing hearing, the federal court applied the guideline for second-degree murder, added an obstruction enhancement, and imposed a twenty-year sentence, which the Fourth Circuit affirmed. The settlement, the plea, the sentence, and the affirmance were distinct proceedings with different decision makers — Bamberg's civil role was to represent the family and negotiate with the city while federal prosecutors carried the criminal case — but Santana's recording ran through all of them, connecting the separate proceedings without collapsing their responsibilities.

A Statewide Ban on Citation Quotas

The Scott case drew scrutiny to claims about traffic-stop expectations inside police departments, and Bamberg — then a first-term state legislator — converted that scrutiny into law. He sponsored House Bill 4387 with lawmakers from both parties, and Governor Nikki Haley signed the measure on June 9, 2016. Act 264 bars South Carolina law-enforcement agencies from requiring officers to issue a specified number of citations within a designated period and extends whistleblower protection to employees who report violations.

The statute draws a careful line. Agencies may still evaluate officers through points of contact with residents and businesses and through community-oriented work; what they may not do is turn the number of citations written into a production target. A rule that began with one traffic stop in North Charleston now governs every police department in the state.

Body-Camera Cases

Bamberg has repeatedly built cases around the moment a recorded encounter meets an official account. He represented Clarence Gailyard after body-camera footage documented an Orangeburg police encounter in which Officer Aqkwele Polidore de-escalated the situation and reported Officer David Dukes's conduct. The city fired Dukes, state investigators charged him, and Orangeburg paid Gailyard $650,000, apologized, and undertook an organizational review.

He also represented Travis Price after body-camera footage contradicted Rock Hill's account of Price's arrest. The prosecutor dismissed the charge and stated publicly that Price had done nothing wrong; the officer was fired and apologized; and Rock Hill paid Price $500,000 in 2023. In both matters, the footage let city officials and prosecutors compare public statements against a timed visual record, and the resulting resolutions addressed all three dimensions of the harm: compensation, correction of the public record, and review of police conduct.

The Alton Sterling Settlement

Bamberg represented Alton Sterling's five children in civil claims arising from Sterling's death during a Baton Rouge police encounter. Baton Rouge approved a $4.5 million settlement in 2021 — but the resolution reached beyond money. It required policy changes addressing de-escalation, warnings before deadly force when feasible, chokeholds, and firing into moving vehicles. The two halves of the agreement answered different parts of the family's case: compensation for Sterling's children, and written rules for the encounters that would come after.

The Del'Quan Seagers Matter

Bamberg filed wrongful-death and survival claims for the family of Del'Quan Seagers, who died at AMIkids Sand Hills, a private program operating within South Carolina's juvenile-justice system. A legislative audit criticized the Department of Juvenile Justice's investigation and oversight of the facility. In January 2019, after the parties reached a proposed settlement, the federal court transferred the action to Charleston County Probate Court for the approval South Carolina law requires and retained jurisdiction to dismiss the case once approval issued.

Representation in the Murdaugh Financial-Crime Cases

When the Alex Murdaugh financial crimes unraveled, Bamberg represented members of the Hakeem Pinckney family and other people whose settlement funds Murdaugh had stolen. He accompanied family members at Murdaugh's state sentencing and carried the victim representation through sentencing and restitution proceedings while state and federal prosecutors proved the criminal charges. That division of responsibility mattered: Bamberg's role was to keep the affected families' losses and restitution interests before the sentencing courts as the prosecutions ran their course.

The results were concrete. In 2025, banker Russell Laffitte admitted that he and Murdaugh misappropriated $309,581.46 from funds held for Hakeem Pinckney and his estate. Laffitte received a five-year federal sentence and a state sentence that included eight active years concurrent with the federal term; under the state plea, he paid $3,555,884.80 in restitution. Murdaugh pleaded guilty to twenty-two federal financial crimes and received a forty-year federal sentence, with a federal judgment ordering $8,762,731.88 in restitution and $10,034,377.95 in forfeiture.

Law Practice and Legislative Service

Bamberg entered the South Carolina House in 2015 and represents District 90, covering parts of Bamberg, Colleton, Dorchester, and Orangeburg Counties, where he serves on the Judiciary Committee. He comes from a law-enforcement family: his father served as a police chief, his mother served in the military and later supervised major criminal investigations, and his brother became a state trooper. That background shaped a position he articulated in 2017 — support for law enforcement and insistence on accountability are not opposites. He remembers what it was to be the household waiting when a parent was called out at night. In his civil-rights work, the question is always the same: what does the evidence show about this particular encounter?

He began his legal career defending insurers and corporate defendants before moving to plaintiff-side work and founding Bamberg Legal in 2016. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of South Carolina and is admitted in South Carolina and the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. His practice spans civil-rights, police-misconduct, catastrophic-injury, and wrongful-death matters — and he runs it from his hometown. He has explained why: “This community made me who I am, and there are a lot of people who invested in me.” The choice keeps a nationally visible civil-rights practice rooted in the rural community where it began.