Timothy P. O’Brien

Bielevicz v. Dubinon

Barbara Bielevicz and Robert Tumpa were arrested for public intoxication in Pittsburgh before dawn on December 23, 1984, held for roughly three hours, and released without citation, charge, or hearing. Tumpa had passed a breath test shortly before the arrest, and Bielevicz said the odor of alcohol came from a drink spilled inside the car.

A jury found the officers liable, but the trial judge directed a verdict for the City of Pittsburgh. O’Brien argued the appeal, and in 1990 the Third Circuit reversed and returned the municipal claim for further proceedings.

The court held that a municipal custom may be established through policymaker knowledge and acquiescence even when the practice appears in no written policy. The plaintiffs still had to prove a plausible causal connection between that custom and their constitutional injury — custom without causation would not suffice.

The decision supplied an evidentiary route that civil-rights plaintiffs have followed ever since: into complaint intake, supervisory knowledge, arrest practices, repeated misconduct, and what policymakers knew but left unchanged.

Williams v. City of Pittsburgh and the Nation’s First Police Consent Decree

O’Brien served as lead counsel in a broad civil action brought in 1996 by Pittsburgh residents and community organizations concerning alleged police misconduct. The action addressed force review, searches, arrests, complaints, discipline, and supervision — the management systems through which a department either corrects its officers or does not.

The United States opened a separate pattern-or-practice investigation, the first it had ever pursued against a city police department under the authority Congress created in 1994. In April 1997, a federal consent decree made Pittsburgh the first city in the nation to place its police bureau under such an agreement. The decree required reports concerning force, searches, seizures, and traffic stops; supervisory review; an automated early-warning system tracking complaint histories and warning signs; revised investigation and discipline; civil-rights training; and an independent auditor.

The private action and the federal enforcement case proceeded separately while examining related management systems. The decree required complaint histories and supervisory decisions to be recorded so conduct could be compared across officers, units, and time — converting individual grievances into a record a court could supervise. The framework became a national template for federal oversight of local policing.

O’Brien later joined community groups urging the Justice Department not to dilute the reforms. The federal case closed in 2005 after years of monitoring and a stipulated termination process.

Brown v. Vitalbo and the Right to Record

Teresa Brown, Monica Jackson, and Anthony Grace witnessed a confrontation in Pittsburgh in September 2013. Jackson stopped recording after an officer threatened arrest. Officers later grabbed and frisked Grace.

Five months after the residents complained to oversight agencies, all three received disorderly-conduct citations. A municipal judge found them not guilty.

O’Brien served as volunteer counsel with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. The federal action alleged intimidation, retaliatory prosecution, force, and failure to train officers concerning the public’s right to record police.

Pittsburgh resolved the case in 2018 for $40,000 and encouraged adoption of a recording policy and officer training. The settlement followed the Third Circuit’s 2017 recognition, in Fields v. City of Philadelphia, of a First Amendment right to record police in public — placing Pittsburgh’s training obligations on constitutional footing the officers could no longer mistake.

Jules Williams in Allegheny County Jail

Jules Williams, a transgender woman, alleged that Allegheny County Jail repeatedly housed her with men and failed to protect her during incarcerations between 2015 and 2017. During one 2015 stay, she was placed for four days with a man whose record included violent sexual offenses despite her requests for different housing.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania and O’Brien’s office filed suit in 2017. The complaint alleged that the jail followed a categorical housing practice despite federal regulations requiring individualized housing and safety assessments for transgender prisoners.

Discovery and pretrial proceedings continued until a March 2022 settlement conference produced an agreement before the scheduled jury trial. Housing records, requests for protection, and cell assignments were central to the claim — the paper trail of decisions that placed a vulnerable person in danger.

Allegheny County paid Williams $300,000. By settlement, the jail had adopted policies intended to require individualized housing and safety decisions for vulnerable people, including transgender detainees.

McGuire and Municipal Indemnification

Shane McGuire was sixteen when off-duty Pittsburgh officer Colby Neidig chased and punched him after vandalism at the officer’s home. A federal jury found that Neidig acted under color of state law, used unreasonable force, and committed assault and battery.

The jury awarded McGuire $75,000. Neidig later assigned McGuire a potential indemnification claim against Pittsburgh, and O’Brien litigated whether the city had a separate obligation to pay the officer’s judgment — a question the verdict itself had not answered.

On November 23, 2022, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court distinguished action “under color of state law” for Section 1983 purposes from the separate “scope of office or duties” inquiry under Pennsylvania indemnification law.

The opinion now provides distinct analyses for constitutional liability and municipal payment obligations, ensuring that neither inquiry silently decides the other. A federal color-of-law finding opens the courthouse door; the indemnification question determines who ultimately stands behind the judgment.

Litigation, Teaching, and Neutral Practice

O’Brien practices civil-rights law through O’Brien Coleman & Wright and serves as a principal neutral through JUSTUS ADR Services, bringing decades of trial judgment to the evaluation and resolution of disputes. As an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he teaches Section 1983 litigation, carrying the doctrine he helped build into the classroom.

His practice spans constitutional claims, police misconduct including excessive and deadly force, false arrest, and malicious prosecution, employment discrimination, the reemployment rights of veterans, and personal injury. His trial work includes a multimillion-dollar employment-discrimination verdict ranking among the largest returned in the Western District of Pennsylvania. He co-founded and chaired the Allegheny County Bar Association’s Civil Rights Committee, served as a vice president of the Association’s Board of Governors, and helped establish and chaired the Diversity Committee of the Academy of Trial Lawyers of Allegheny County. He earned his B.A. from Missouri Valley College and his J.D. from Duquesne University, and has been admitted to practice since 1975, including before the United States Supreme Court since 1978.

Those matters turn on the distinct inquiries his cases have clarified: the underlying conduct, the municipal policy or custom, causation, training, available relief, and any separate public obligation to satisfy a judgment. His career has given each inquiry its own law — and injured citizens a clearer path through all of them.