California Civil Rights Attorney | Julia Sherwin

Julia has handled numerous cutting-edge wrongful death and serious injury cases, including for example:

• The largest civil rights wrongful death settlement in California history at the time ($8.3 million) for the jail beating, choking, and restraint asphyxiation of a man who was suffering from severe alcohol withdrawal, plus first-in-the-nation reforms requiring not only Alameda County but also its private for-profit jail health care corporation to provide Registered Nurses or higher level caregivers for all patient assessments throughout all of the corporation’s contracts in the State of California;
• $11.5 million for a jail inmate rendered quadriplegic by deliberately indifferent health care providers employed by a for-profit correctional healthcare corporation;
• $7.3 million for the children of a man who was severely beaten, choked, and subjected to restraint asphyxia by local police officers;
• $6.7 million catastrophic injury settlement for a Mom who was permanently disabled by police who broke into her home and smashed her ankle when she insisted that they get a warrant before entering her home to arrest her teenage daughter;
• $5.5 million for an unarmed man who was brutalized and had both hands crushed by deputies after he surrendered to them;
• $5.1 million settlement for a mentally ill man who had been declared incompetent to stand trial (IST) and was beaten to death in jail by another severely mentally ill inmate, while he waited for Napa State Hospital to comply with a court order requiring the hospital to admit him for inpatient care;
• $5 million for the death of 3-year-old Kayleigh Slusher, along with sweeping reforms to the Napa Police Department’s child abuse investigation and response protocols that will save children’s lives in the future;

• $5 million for the jail beating and restraint asphyxiation death of a schizophrenic man in psychiatric crisis, plus a new county-wide Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training program for deputies to safely handle contacts with mentally ill people, mandatory police use of body-worn video cameras, and training on the dangers of prone restraint and restraint or compression asphyxia;
• $4.35 million for failure to diagnose a cardiac condition in a 9-year-old boy;
• A case obtaining the State of California’s first mandatory training program in public schools to combat homophobia, discrimination and harassment against LGBTQ students and teachers, followed by over $1 million after winning a trial for a high school teacher who was disciplined and threatened with termination for speaking out against such discrimination in his classroom;
• A case of first impression nationally to recognize the First Amendment rights of Administrative Law Judges to make decisions free of outside pressure;
• And many other wrongful death cases including Mario Gonzalez.

Julia has also taught both lawyers and forensic pathologists, nationally and internationally, about restraint asphyxia and the junk science defense of “excited delirium,” including being an invited speaker at an international Death in Custody conference of physicians and forensic pathologists, where she spoke to 197 attendees from 27 countries.  She is one of five co-authors of the Physicians for Human Rights report on Excited Delirium, entitled “Excited Delirium” and Deaths in Police Custody:  the Deadly Impact of a Baseless Diagnosis.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and worldwide protests against police misconduct, Julia founded Walls of Justice (@walls_of_justice), an online gallery of street art dedicated to social and racial justice and ending police misconduct.