sued the city

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                        UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

                  FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA




             JUSTIN HALL,

                          Plaintiff,

             -vs-                     CASE NO. C 96-3038 MMC-ENE

             CITY AND COUNTY OF
             SAN FRANCISCO, et al.,

when i was set free, i had an arrest record for felony attempted arson and inciting a riot, not to mention jaywalking.

so i consulted my family and hired a family-recommended attorney, tony tamburello. he agreed to work to get my arrest record cleared, by filing a motion to expunge (in case i ever saught after that defense department job, or got pulled over and some cop didn't like attempted arsonists), and he would do that work for free if i would sue the city to pay his legal fees. he would take 30 % of what i got from the city.
sounded quite resonable to me!
so my record was cleared, and then i sued the city, in the case marked above. of 278 people arrested, i believe i was the only person who ultimately got the charges dropped and successfully got some money out of the city - which in my book is tantamount to an admission that they were overzealous arresters. i wish more people would have know about quality attorney options - from what i heard most of the arrestees represented themselves in small claims court and thoroughly lost.
in my case, i had tony a very competant and old-school seeming criminal attorney with great stories and incredible facial hair, and a civil attorney russel robinson, a mountain view based attorney a bit younger who made for good conversation as well, and laughed at my sensibilities.
the two of them, and i, and one other dude (i don't know what happened with his case - he may have emerged victorious as well) filed a class action lawsuit.

i was deposed, and i was amazed i got a digital copy of the deposition to post here.

and we settled, we sat around a table and argued about money. i think i won around $3000, after my lawyers took their chunks out of the $11000, coughed up by san francisco tax payers, because their police overstepped their limits.
strange to see the wheels of justice moving in all these ways.

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