Michael J. Haddad

The jail cases that followed kept the same shape. On August 14, 2018, Randall Johnson, a fifty-six-year-old painter, tried to kill himself with methamphetamine; Redding police arrested him instead of letting him go to a hospital, and at the Shasta County Jail the intake staff filled out forms saying he was fine while he babbled, screamed and vomited. Over the next thirty-six hours no one treated the overdose, and it killed him. Haddad and Sherwin represented his sister, Katherine Johnson. Wellpath, the jail's medical contractor, settled five days before trial for $11.1 million, and Shasta County and the City of Redding paid $1.65 million more, $12.75 million in all, in August 2023. A 2024 settlement of a third jail death, kept anonymous at the family's request, paid $5.9 million and wrote the Harrison lessons into the jail's rules: vocational nurses may not do the work of registered nurses or mental-health clinicians, mental-health staff must be retrained on individual treatment plans, everyone who deals with incarcerated people must take suicide-prevention training every year, and vocational nurses must work under continuous clinical supervision.

Combined Force

Humberto "Beto" Martinez died in 2016 under six Pittsburg police officers. Haddad represented his children, and the question on appeal was whether each officer could be judged only by his own hands. Haddad argued that a group restraint has to be evaluated as the force it added up to, and on June 18, 2020, the Ninth Circuit agreed that the evidence, read in the family's favor, supported liability for every officer who was an integral participant, whether or not he performed the final act, and affirmed the denial of qualified immunity. The children settled for $7.3 million, and Pittsburg confirmed that choke and carotid holds were prohibited and agreed to train its officers that a man held face down may not be able to breathe. Mario Gonzalez died the same way on April 19, 2021, pinned to the ground by Alameda police for more than five minutes; the county's pathologist attributed the death mainly to methamphetamine, and Haddad and Sherwin commissioned a second autopsy that found restraint asphyxia. In September 2023, the district court held that a jury could find the detention, the arrest and the prolonged restraint unlawful, denied qualified immunity on the Fourth Amendment claims and set the case for trial in November. It settled in December 2023: $11 million for Gonzalez's young son and estate, paid through the risk pool that insures the City of Alameda, and $350,000 for his mother. In the shooting death of Daniel Shaham, Haddad and Sherwin represented Denise Smart and reconstructed the encounter shot by shot from the video, the dispatch record, the scene measurements and the medical evidence; that case settled for $7 million before trial.

One Hundred and Twenty-Two

On May 30, 2020, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved 122 men from the California Institution for Men at Chino, where COVID-19 was already loose, to San Quentin, which had no known case. Most of them had not been tested in more than three weeks, and none was screened for symptoms before the crowded bus ride. Within three weeks nearly five hundred men at San Quentin had tested positive; in the end more than 2,100 incarcerated people and 270 staff were infected, and about twenty-six prisoners and one guard died. The guard was Sergeant Gilbert Polanco, fifty-five, who fell ill in late June and died in August. Haddad argued his family's appeal, Polanco v. Diaz, and on August 7, 2023, in an opinion by Judge Michelle T. Friedland, the Ninth Circuit held that the transfer had placed Polanco in far greater danger than he faced before, that the officials had acted with deliberate indifference to a risk they knew, and that the state-created-danger rule had been clear enough to deny them qualified immunity. The Supreme Court declined to review the decision on May 13, 2024. In Hampton v. California, decided on October 3, 2023 for the widow of Michael Hampton, a sixty-two-year-old San Quentin prisoner who died of COVID-19 pneumonia that September 25, the same judge wrote that the right to be free from exposure to a serious disease had been clearly established since 1993, and that the immunity Congress gave in the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act for administering a covered countermeasure does not reach a failure to administer one at all. He had been before the same court before: in Green v. City and County of San Francisco, decided in 2014, the Ninth Circuit restored the claims of a woman held at gunpoint after a license-plate reader misread her plate, and in Wilkins v. City of Oakland, in 2003, it refused immunity to the officers who shot an undercover Oakland officer they took for a suspect.

Haddad was born and raised in Detroit. "My parents taught me about the history of discrimination in the country and about social justice issues," he has said, and he went from James Madison College at Michigan State, where he graduated with honors in 1988, to the University of Michigan Law School, class of 1991, and then to Goodman, Eden, Millender & Bedrosian, the Detroit firm that had been the first racially integrated law practice in the country, first as a law clerk on its civil-rights research and later as a partner. When the firm dissolved in 1998 after nearly fifty years, he moved to California, where he was already admitted, married Sherwin, and started Haddad & Sherwin in Oakland with about five cases, working from their dining room until they could buy the downtown offices in 2004. He was president of the National Police Accountability Project from 2010 to 2015 and has sat on its board since 2000, and he trains officers as well as suing them, on deadly force, mental-health encounters, search and seizure and internal affairs. Asked what he would tell a lawyer starting out, he said: "I would tell them to choose to do the kind of work that's important to them, that they believe matters."