From a false arrest to many car crashes, Nashville paid $5M to settle lawsuits in 2023
Ralph Ward wanted to earn a little extra money for his mom’s 70th birthday.
One day in November 2019, after working shifts at his two jobs so he could save up and throw her a nice party, he went to a liquor store on Nolensville Road. Minutes later, he didn’t know if he’d be alive to see her again.
Uniformed and plainclothes officers burst into the liquor store and ordered him to get on the ground. He complied. As a Black man, he had always tried to keep a straight-laced appearance, to use the right words, to hold down his corporate job so he could avoid situations like this.
“All of that was just completely out of the window that night,” Ward said in an interview in mid-January. "I knew that I was about to be the next hashtag in the Black Lives Matter movement," Ward later said in a text.
He was booked into the Davidson County jail and bonded out early the next morning.
He knew he hadn’t done anything illegal. A judge dismissed his case after five months and several court dates when the prosecution didn’t show up, Ward said.
In January 2023, the Metro Nashville Council settled his wrongful arrest lawsuit against the Metro Nashville Police Department, which appeared to confuse Ward with another person who had fled police while driving a different car. Ward was awarded $236,000.
“I’d rather have my sanity back,” Ward said in an interview.
Ward’s case is in some ways extraordinary — it was one of the largest false arrests settlements Metro has agreed to, his attorney Kyle Mothershead said — but the six-figure sum paid to him represents just under 5% of the total settlements Metro Nashville paid out in 2023.
The Tennessean compiled and analyzed all settlements approved by the Metro Council and the Metro Nashville Public Schools Board of Education, finding that the city agreed to pay out more than $5.1 million to resolve 58 claims against it in 2023.
That's the highest annual settlement total in the last five years, topping the $4.7 million total in 2021 (which included $2.25 million to settle the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Daniel Hambrick, a Black man who was fatally shot in 2018 by white police officer Andrew Delke).
Settlements for claims involving the Metro Nashville Police Department account for nearly 40% of the 2023 total.
Litigation sometimes stretches several years, meaning a settlement might be approved any amount of time after a lawsuit is filed. Of the 45 settlements approved for cases involving Metro departments in 2023, a dozen spurred from events that happened the same year.
Not all Metro settlements are linked to lawsuits — Metro Legal's claims division processes claims against the city.
"When it's clear Metro is at fault (especially in car accidents where liability is clear) we do not force claimants to file a lawsuit," Metro Legal Director Wallace Dietz wrote in an email to The Tennessean.
Instead, the claims team can propose settlements, which then must be approved by Metro Legal's settlement committee and Metro Council.
Where the money went: Cases involve police, schools, car crashes
Claims involving Metro Nashville Police account for nearly 40% of settlement dollars approved in 2023, in large part due to a $1.2 million wrongful conviction settlement and Ward's $236,000 settlement for wrongful arrest and excessive force.
Metro Nashville Public Schools logged the second-highest settlement total, coming in at nearly $964,000 for 13 cases, most of which spurred from crashes involving MNPS vehicles and school buses. Other cases included a six-figure settlement for a referee who was "clotheslined" on the field, wrongful termination, alleged sexual harassment and due process issues under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Nearly 36% of settlement dollars approved in 2023 went toward claims related to crashes involving Metro or MNPS vehicles.
Associate Director of Law Allison Bussell confirmed the majority of Metro Nashville’s settlements — whether through claims or litigation — involve vehicle crashes.
"The Department of Law has not evaluated whether the rate is any higher than would be expected in a city this size with this number of employees," she wrote. "That said, all Metro Nashville employees who drive vehicles as part of their job duties take a mandatory defensive driving course at regular intervals. And, employee discipline is utilized where necessary to address the issue."
But cases with comparatively smaller settlement figures still represent life-altering hardships for claimants.
A hole in the sidewalk
In March 2018, Beth Giddens visited Nashville from Athens, Georgia, where she worked at the University of Georgia. Walking down the street after visiting museums one afternoon, she tripped in a hole on the sidewalk where a street sign had been removed.
She hit her head on the curb and was taken to the hospital. She later suffered from post-concussion syndrome, limiting her ability to focus, and she lost her job.
After that, she struggled to stay employed. Without health insurance, she didn't go to a doctor for three years.
In 2022, her health worsened to the point that she had no option but to visit a physician. She found she had stage-four cervical cancer.
"I was unable to go to the doctor to find the stage-four cancer before it got to that point," Giddens said in an interview in January. Before, she said, she was diligent about looking after her health.
Fewer than 20% of people who are diagnosed with this type of cancer are expected to survive five years.
Giddens was awarded $30,000 to settle her injury lawsuit against Metro Nashville in February 2023. She said her attorney received about $10,000 of that.
The roughly $19,000 she got is not a lot, she said, but at that point she "didn't have the energy to fight it in me." That sum has gone toward everything from living expenses to the cost of her cancer treatment, supplementing the $1,700 in disability payments she gets each month.
$1.2M wrongful conviction settlement accounts for 23% of year's total
A $1.2 million settlement, 23% of the year's total, went to Paul Shane Garrett, who was wrongfully convicted of manslaughter in the 2000 North Nashville death of 30-year-old Velma Tharpe. Garrett was imprisoned until 2011, and all charges against him were dismissed in summer 2021.
DNA evidence linked another man, Calvin Atchison, to the case, but Atchison was not fully investigated until 2011. He was indicted on first-degree murder charges in May 2021, and his case is ongoing.
Garrett originally sued Nashville for $18 million. His settlement falls in line with federal compensation law, which provides $50,000 per year of wrongful incarceration, but the $1.2 million is dwarfed by similar settlements in other states. In Indiana, for example, the city of Elkhart agreed in December 2023 to pay $12 million to settle the case of Andrew Royer, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 2002 and exonerated in 2021.
Jason Gichner of the Tennessee Innocence Project said exonerations in Tennessee are low compared to other states, with just more than 30 logged since 1989.
"(Garrett's settlement) is not low for Tennessee, considering almost nobody in Tennessee gets a settlement, but when you look at what's going on in other states around the country, it's quite low," Gichner said.
Sidewalk settlements top $655K
Seventeen individuals and builders received settlements after suing the city over a 2017 ordinance that required them to build sidewalks as part of their construction projects or pay fees into a citywide sidewalk fund. A federal appeals court effectively struck down the ordinance in May 2023.
Sidewalk settlements totaled $655,337.69 — about 13% of the overall amount. The majority of the approved settlement money will come from the Nashville Department of Transportation's sidewalk fund.
To receive a refund of money paid into the fund or the cost of sidewalk construction, property owners must submit a claim to Metro and the costs must have been incurred from May 10, 2022, onward (marking one year before the appeals court's ruling). It's not clear how many property owners are eligible to recover costs this way.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville paid $5M to settle dozens of lawsuits in 2023
