Michael J. Haddad

Four Shots on the Overpass

Daniel Shaham stood beside his car with a folding knife that was later found closed on the pavement. Michael Haddad built the case around the distance, the timing, the officer’s own training, and the difference between a possible danger and an immediate threat.

A 911 caller saw Shaham on an Interstate 5 overpass on June 4, 2016, and believed the thirty-one-year-old might be considering suicide. California Highway Patrol Officer Paul Shadwell spoke with him, returned to his patrol car, reviewed the dispatch material, and approached again.

Shaham was then inside his car with a folding pocketknife. He opened the blade partway and closed it. After he stepped from the vehicle, he moved sideways toward the rear. The parties disputed whether his movement threatened the officer. The family’s pretrial account placed Shaham twelve to fifteen feet away, taking slow steps without raising the knife or lunging.

Shadwell fired four rounds. Two entered Shaham’s chest, one struck his leg, and another entered his back. The closed knife was recovered from the ground.

Potential Threat, Immediate Threat

Haddad and Julia Sherwin prepared Denise Smart’s federal excessive-force and wrongful-death claims for trial. The pretrial order identified the issues a jury would have to resolve: what Shadwell saw, what Shaham did, when deadly force became necessary, whether the officer continued firing after the asserted threat changed, and how CHP training applied to the encounter.

Jurors had to decide whether Shaham presented an immediate threat when Shadwell fired. The jury would have compared the officer’s testimony with dash-camera video, dispatch information, scene measurements, the closed knife, medical evidence, and CHP training governing when an officer should point and fire a weapon.

Before the $7 million settlement, Haddad’s team reconstructed the encounter through distance, movement, the closed knife, video, training, and the timing of each shot.

Three Minutes and Forty-Five Seconds

Mario Gonzalez’s case began in a small Alameda park. Neighbors reported a confused man near a fence; one caller said he was not doing anything wrong but was frightening the caller’s wife. Officers spoke with Gonzalez, determined that liquor bottles near him had not been stolen, called for additional officers, and moved to detain him.

Body-camera video showed officers applying pain-compliance holds, forcing Gonzalez face-down, handcuffing him, and continuing to restrain him with their force and body weight. He remained prone for three minutes and forty-five seconds after the handcuffs were secured. When officers finally rolled him over, he was unresponsive.

Haddad and Sherwin represented Gonzalez’s young son. The federal court had to decide whether the initial seizure was lawful and whether prolonged pressure remained reasonable after Gonzalez was prone, handcuffed, and no longer presented the danger needed to justify force capable of restricting respiration.

Prone Restraint and Established Law

At summary judgment, the district court held that a reasonable jury could find the detention and arrest unlawful and the prolonged prone restraint excessive. The governing cases had already warned that pressure on a handcuffed person lying face-down can cause serious injury or death, particularly when the person poses no continuing threat.

The court denied qualified immunity on the core Fourth Amendment claims, preserving jury review of the body-camera sequence under precedent governing prolonged pressure on a handcuffed, prone person.

Trial was set for November 2023. The officers appealed the immunity ruling on the eve of trial, an interlocutory step that would have delayed jury proceedings. The parties then negotiated two settlements through Alameda’s public-entity risk authority: $11 million for Gonzalez’s son and estate, and a separate $350,000 agreement resolving his mother’s action. The city stated that the agreements were not admissions of liability or fact.

Six Officers, One Restraint

Humberto “Beto” Martinez’s death required a different analysis of shared force. Pittsburg officers stopped his car in July 2016 for expired registration. After a brief pursuit, Martinez ran into a house. Six officers eventually participated in the effort to restrain him.

The family alleged that officers used punches, kicks, a Taser, choke or carotid holds, and pressure on Martinez’s neck, back, and torso while he was prone. Body-camera recordings captured him repeatedly saying that he could not breathe. The autopsy documented severe injuries, including damage to the neck, multiple rib fractures, a fractured sternum, and trauma to the lungs and liver. The pathologist identified probable obstruction of respiration complicated by carotid-sinus stimulation.

The officers sought qualified immunity. Their appellate argument treated each person’s contribution separately and contended that no individual act, viewed alone, established the constitutional violation.

When Every Officer Contributes to the Force

Haddad argued that a group restraint cannot be understood by isolating each hand, strike, hold, and application of weight from the combined force imposed on one person. The Ninth Circuit agreed that the evidence, viewed in the family’s favor, supported integral-participant liability.

Every named officer had been actively involved. Each struck, tased, restrained, or otherwise participated in the struggle. The court held that an officer need not personally perform the final act that causes injury when the officer has fundamental involvement in the combined constitutional violation.

The law was also clearly established. A chokehold on a nonresisting restrained person and force that squeezes the breath from a prone, handcuffed individual despite pleas for air were already recognized as unreasonable. On June 18, 2020, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial of qualified immunity and cleared the case for trial.

The Hold Pittsburg Banned

Martinez’s children resolved the case for $7.3 million before trial. The settlement also changed police policy and training. Pittsburg confirmed that officers were prohibited from using the choke or carotid hold and agreed to train them on the danger that prone restraint can impair breathing.

The settlement’s policy terms addressed both the group-use-of-force doctrine and the physical techniques at issue. Pittsburg’s ban and training commitments applied the litigation’s findings to later encounters.

The $7.3 million payment resolved the family’s claims, while the chokehold prohibition and prone-restraint training changed what later officers would be taught before another encounter reached the same point.

One Hundred Twenty-Two People on the Buses

The San Quentin COVID-19 cases focused on a transfer planned by prison officials rather than a split-second use of force. On May 30, 2020, California officials moved 122 incarcerated people from the California Institution for Men, where a severe outbreak was underway, to San Quentin, which then had no known cases.

The complaints in Polanco v. Diaz and Hampton v. California alleged that officials used outdated tests, failed to screen and quarantine adequately, crowded people onto buses, and disregarded warnings from medical and public-health specialists. The transfer was followed by an outbreak infecting more than two thousand incarcerated people. More than twenty-five prisoners and Sergeant Gilbert Polanco died.

Haddad argued both Ninth Circuit appeals. The appeals required the Ninth Circuit to decide which constitutional rule applied when officials allegedly created danger by transferring prisoners rather than by using force.

State-Created Danger

The Constitution ordinarily does not impose a general duty on government to protect every person from every danger. The state-created-danger doctrine addresses the different situation in which officials affirmatively place people in a more dangerous position and act with deliberate indifference to a known, particularized risk.

At the motion-to-dismiss stage, the Ninth Circuit accepted the Polanco complaint’s factual allegations as true. It held that transferring potentially infected people into San Quentin plausibly exposed staff and residents to a danger they otherwise would not have faced. The allegations also supported deliberate indifference: officials had time to consider the testing, warnings, transportation conditions, and receiving prison before completing the transfer.

The court allowed the Polanco family’s claim to proceed beyond qualified immunity. The Supreme Court denied review on May 13, 2024, leaving the Ninth Circuit ruling in place.

PREP Act Immunity and Testing Failures

Hampton added a statutory immunity question. Prison officials argued that the federal Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act shielded them because COVID tests were medical countermeasures covered during the public-health emergency.

The Ninth Circuit distinguished administration from non-administration. The complaint alleged failures to use current tests and infection-control measures before the transfer. A statute protecting claims caused by administering or using a covered countermeasure did not, on the face of the complaint, immunize the failure to administer or use one.

The Ninth Circuit largely preserved Hampton’s Eighth Amendment claim and rejected PREP Act immunity at the pleading stage. Polanco addressed the danger created by the transfer itself; Hampton clarified that alleged failures to use available tests and infection-control measures were not automatically shielded as administration of covered countermeasures.

Discovery after the Ninth Circuit

The Polanco decision returned the family’s case to the district court for factual development. By 2026, defendants had answered an amended complaint, expert discovery continued, and the schedule extended into summary-judgment proceedings.

Haddad secured a published ruling allowing a state-created-danger claim against high-level prison officials. To prevail, the family must show what officials knew, why they approved the transfer, which precautions were available, and how the transfer caused Sergeant Polanco’s death.

The appellate ruling opened discovery into warnings, testing data, communications, and planning surrounding the transfer.

Clinical Scope and Supervision

A 2024 jail-suicide settlement provided $5.9 million and required changes to medical care and jail procedures, while the family remained unnamed in the public announcement.

The agreement prohibited a county jail from assigning licensed vocational nurses to perform work outside their legal scope as registered nurses or mental-health clinicians. It required individualized-treatment-plan retraining for mental-health staff, annual suicide-prevention training for personnel who interact with incarcerated people, and continuous clinical supervision for vocational nurses working in the jail.

The terms translate professional scope into daily operations. A license determines what care a person is trained and legally authorized to provide. Supervision determines whether someone with broader clinical authority is continuously available when suicide risk changes. Training determines whether custody and medical staff recognize and communicate warning signs.

Made in Detroit

Haddad was born in Detroit and began his legal career in Michigan after graduating from Michigan State University’s James Madison College and the University of Michigan Law School. He became a partner at Goodman, Eden, Millender & Bedrosian, a historic integrated civil-rights and plaintiffs’ firm.

He moved his practice to California in the 1990s and later formed Haddad & Sherwin with Julia Sherwin. The firm’s phrase—“made in Detroit”—describes a tradition of representing ordinary people against police departments, jails, and other government agencies while preparing cases for both trial and appeal.

Haddad served as president of the National Police Accountability Project from 2010 through 2015, sat on its executive committee from 2000 through 2018, and continues on its board. NPAP supports civil-rights lawyers through co-counsel programs, amicus work, continuing education, legislative advocacy, and resources for people harmed by law enforcement.

Accountability Includes Officers

Haddad’s civil-rights practice also represents conscientious law-enforcement officers whose rights are violated and provides training on use of force, deadly force, encounters involving mental illness, search and seizure, and internal-affairs procedure.

That work applies constitutional protections to people subjected to force or confinement and to officers facing unlawful arrest, retaliation, discrimination, or government-created danger.

His reported matters include deadly-force, prone-restraint, group-participation, state-created-danger, statutory-immunity, and jail-medical-scope issues.