Mari Newman

Marvin Booker: Two Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds

Marvin Booker was fifty-six years old, weighed approximately 135 pounds, and preached on the streets of Denver. In July 2010, he was arrested on a warrant connected to a missed hearing. During booking at the downtown detention center, he turned back toward the chair where he had left his shoes.

Deputies characterized the movement as resistance. The estate's evidence presented a different sequence: officers forced Booker face-down, placed substantial weight on his back, applied a carotid hold for roughly two and a half minutes, ran an eight-second Taser cycle, and kept control of him after he was handcuffed and his limbs were restrained.

Newman represented Booker's estate. Before trial, the Tenth Circuit affirmed the denial of qualified immunity, holding that a jury could find excessive force, deliberate indifference to an urgent medical need, failure to intervene, and supervisory liability. Then, across a three-week trial, Newman and the estate's team presented the booking video, the restraint duration, the medical evidence, the officers' roles, the intervention opportunities, and the supervision evidence — giving jurors the basis to assess what each official did within the two-minute-fifty-five-second sequence. One official initiated the restraint; others added pressure or devices; others had time to intervene or summon medical help, and did not.

The jury returned a $4.65 million verdict, and Denver later completed a $6 million resolution encompassing the verdict, attorney fees, and costs — one of the largest police-accountability results in the city's history.

Michael Marshall: Reform as a Term of Settlement

Michael Marshall entered Denver's jail in November 2015 after an arrest for trespassing. He was homeless, had schizophrenia, and was experiencing a psychotic episode. During an encounter with deputies, he was held prone, vomited, lost consciousness, and was placed in a restraint chair. He died nine days later, after life support was withdrawn.

The legal logic Newman pressed was as simple as it was unanswerable: Marshall could not leave the jail, choose a provider, or call an outside physician. Because the jail controlled his movement, it bore the responsibility for recognizing and responding to his psychiatric and medical distress.

Newman and Marshall's family negotiated a $4.65 million payment from Denver — and, just as central to the family, reforms with names and numbers attached: mental-health staffing requirements, round-the-clock clinician access, psychiatric-crisis and de-escalation training, and revisions to force and medical-response practices. The resolution converted the family's grief into the specific staffing, training, and clinical procedures that determine whether the next Michael Marshall survives the jail.

Emily's Protocols

Emily Rice was twenty-four when she crashed her car in February 2006 and was taken to Denver Health. The hospital identified a shoulder contusion and released her to the jail. What it missed — a lacerated spleen and liver — was life-threatening but treatable.

During approximately twenty hours in custody, Rice repeatedly complained of pain and showed signs of internal bleeding. She was not returned for adequate medical treatment. She died in her cell.

Newman and co-counsel obtained settlements totaling $7 million for Rice's family — $4 million from Denver Health and $3 million from the City. The agreements required additional training, a protocol governing hospital patients transferred to jail, and vital-sign checks every four hours during the first twenty-four hours after discharge when monitoring was indicated. The reforms became known in Denver as “Emily’s Protocols,” and their core requirement is the one that would have saved her: medical information must follow the patient across the hospital-to-jail transfer.

Amanda Hall: Damages and Cameras

Amanda Hall worked in a prison kitchen under the supervision of Colorado corrections sergeant Leshawn Terrell. The federal court found that Terrell coerced Hall into a sexual relationship over several months and brutally assaulted her after she refused further contact, causing lasting physical and emotional injury.

Newman's litigation produced $354,070.41 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages against the sergeant, plus a separate $250,000 settlement resolving claims involving the Colorado Department of Corrections and other defendants. The settlement carried a structural term aimed at the conditions that had allowed the abuse: officials were required to install cameras in areas that lacked sufficient surveillance — creating an independent evidentiary record in the very locations corrections staff controlled.

Diana Sanchez: A Birth on a Concrete Bench

Diana Sanchez told Denver jail deputies and medical staff that she was in labor. For approximately five hours, she remained in a medical cell while her contractions intensified. She gave birth to her son on a cold concrete bench, with no clinician assisting the delivery.

Newman and Andy McNulty represented Sanchez and her child. Denver Health agreed to pay $320,000 and the City $160,000 — a completed settlement of $480,000 — but the terms reached past money: Denver Health instituted annual pregnancy-and-labor training for jail medical personnel, and the Sheriff Department changed policy so that a person in labor is taken immediately to a hospital.

Newman then carried the issue to the statehouse. Working with community advocates and legislators, she supported Colorado Senate Bill 21-193, enacted in 2021, which imposed facility requirements and restraint reporting for pregnant people in custody, and House Bill 23-1187, enacted in 2023, which added a rebuttable presumption against detention or incarceration for pregnant and postpartum defendants and required specific findings before a court chooses confinement over available alternatives. What began in one medical cell now protects every pregnant person in Colorado's justice system.

Richard Ward: A Tenth Circuit Immunity Ruling

Pueblo County deputies encountered Richard Ward in February 2022 in the back seat of a parked car outside a middle school, beside his mother. Ward said he might have a pocketknife. During questioning, he put an anti-anxiety pill in his mouth. A deputy began pulling him from the car, a struggle followed, and the deputy shot him three times in less than thirty seconds.

Ward's estate and his mother, Kristy Ward Stamp, brought federal claims. The district court held that a jury could find Ward posed no immediate credible threat when force was used, and preserved claims concerning Ward Stamp's detention and the seizure of her phone and vehicle. On appeal, Newman and Andy McNulty joined the family's briefing and won a June 2026 Tenth Circuit ruling rejecting the officers' qualified-immunity challenge — sustaining the family's account against the immunity defense and establishing a favorable constitutional framework for the claims ahead.

Colorado's State Civil-Rights Action

Newman's most far-reaching work may be a statute. She worked with Representative Leslie Herod and a larger coalition on the bill that became Colorado Senate Bill 20-217, testifying during the legislative process in the summer of 2020.

The enacted law created a civil action for violations of rights secured by the Colorado Constitution and made Colorado the first state in the nation to statutorily bar qualified immunity as a defense in this kind of state-level law-enforcement civil-rights action — dismantling, within Colorado, the doctrine Newman had spent years litigating around in cases like Booker and Ward. The statute entitles a prevailing plaintiff to reasonable attorney fees, generally requires a peace officer's employer to indemnify a judgment or settlement, limits physical and deadly force, prohibits chokeholds, requires officers to intervene in unlawful force and report it, expands body-camera obligations, and creates consequences for nonactivation or tampering.

Verdicts, Policy, and Colorado Law

Newman has practiced civil-rights and employment law for more than twenty-five years and now works at Newman | McNulty with Andy McNulty and Madeline Leibin, a firm rooted in client-centered advocacy, representation of marginalized communities, pro bono work, and movement lawyering. Her pro bono commitments have ranged as far as Guantanamo Bay, where she was among the small group of American lawyers who volunteered in the mid-2000s to represent detainees held for years without legal rights or judicial review — work she has described simply as the right thing to do.

Her cases use video, clinical signs, jail-classification records, pregnancy policies, and statutory duties to litigate police force, medical care in custody, surveillance, perinatal care, and state civil-rights remedies — and, again and again, to convert a single client's worst day into rules that protect everyone who comes after.