Gage Johnson
Editor-in-Chief
gjohnson17@murraystate.edu
Sam Aguiar, a Murray State alumnus, helped bring about police reform across Kentucky and $12 million dollars to the family of Breonna Taylor, the Louisville woman shot and killed by police during a raid in March in a settlement finalized on Tuesday, Sept. 15.
Aguiar graduated from Murray High School in 2000 and proceeded to enroll at Murray State in the fall. He had actually had his first son, Evan, two days prior to high school graduation, so it was imperative that he stay near home.
He graduated from Murray State in three and a half years, not really knowing what he wanted to be. Aguiar had majored in psychology, but didn’t want to be a psychologist.
So, he decided to try his luck at the LSAT. After passing, Aguiar ventured to Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, before ultimately landing at University of Louisville as a visiting student because of Hurricane Katrina.
After making it back to the bluegrass state, Aguiar couldn’t afford to move back to New Orleans and has predominantly been in Louisville with his younger son Owen, who is eight years old, and his wife Janelle ever since.
Aguiar then tried his luck at law school in the fall of 2004 and graduated three years later. While in law school, some work he had done let him know that he wanted to be involved in law whether it was as a lawyer or attorney.
“When I was in law school, I was waiting tables and then I was working for a lawyer who did some personal injury work,” Aguiar said. “And I kind of liked the whole concept of ‘you do better for the client the better you do for yourself’ and it’s a win-win and you get to be a voice for the little guy, because I grew up kind of poor, so it was just awesome [to see] this whole notion that you could fight for people.”
Noting that he didn’t like law school and wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a lawyer, Aguiar moved to Nashville for a year where his son was living. While living there he was barely making ends meet, so he took the bar exam one time and determined that if he passed it was meant to be.
Aguiar studied relentlessly using Wikipedia and a $5 used book with practice bar exams in it that he had bought, and it paid off. He passed in Tennessee, but after not finding a job, he went back to Louisville and passed the exam again in Kentucky.
In October of 2008, he began working for Winters & Yonker, which was based out of Florida but had a secondary office in Louisville.
He was thrown into the fire right away, as the firm was given 100-150 cases in a month. Winters and Yonker wanted a lawyer to be the first point of contact for each client, so Aguiar walked clients through the process and then handed the case to someone else.
This wasn’t exactly thrilling to Aguiar at the time, but has realized that it was much more beneficial than he’d initially thought.
“At the time I was like, ‘man this doesn’t really feel like practicing law,’” Aguiar said. “But the reality is that it was like the best thing ever because I got to sit in 1,200 living rooms in a year and really see what the personal effect was on every single person and what they were going through. It hit me like, every case is different. These are folks that are really living week-to-week and regardless of how bad they were hurt, they’re in crisis mode right now.”
A year later, he approached the higher ups of the Winters and Yonker firm about wanting to learn how to be a practicing attorney. At the time they were outsourcing litigation, so they agreed to let him work with another lawyer to start doing litigation in house.
“They actually handed over over 100 cases that needed to go to court,” Aguiar said. “And I didn’t have a mentor so it was kind of trial by fire, but I learned how to be a courtroom lawyer very quickly, but not a good one.”
Aguiar was thankful for the experience he gained, but in 2010 he started practicing on his own. He was working on 28 cases when he departed from the firm and was required by the bar to send letters saying he was leaving and that the clients could stay with him or be in the hands of Winters and Yonker.
About 25 clients said they wanted to retain Aguiar, so he started out with a large caseload. Once those cases were resolved, they worked out an agreement with Winters and Yonker where the check was sent out and part of the fee went to them. Eventually, Aguiar’s hard work paid off.
“After a few months of doing that with some other lawyers and a shared secretary, I was fortunate enough to resolve a case that was just enough for me to write down on a napkin a six-month budget to actually open up my own shop and hire a couple of employees,” Aguiar said.
Aguiar guaranteed those employees jobs for at least six months, with uncertainty for the future looming. However, their reputation quickly showed that they had what it takes to keep their firm afloat.
“We realized real quickly that if you answer all your phone calls, if you find out what people really need and you really, actually, genuinely appreciate your clients and take care of them, it actually puts you in the minority,” Aguiar said.
And just like that, business for Aguiar’s brand new firm started booming.
“It was like a snowball [effect],” Aguiar said. “We started getting clients and they started telling other people to give us a shot and ultimately, you know, it just helped us build a nice book of business and get a good early start with a nice reputation in the community.”
In 2013, they were able to move into the new home for Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers, where they currently reside.
Shortly after, he was lucky enough to meet Bill McMurray, a lawyer from Paducah, Kentucky, who had left to work in San Diego with his wife and had wanted to make his way back to Louisville.
“He really stepped in and we gave him some office space and I said ‘teach me everything you know,’” Aguiar said. “We were there late nights sometimes drinking bourbon, sometimes working on cases together, but it was great because he was my first real mentor. He was one of Kentucky’s best trial lawyers and he taught me how to be a real lawyer.”
On Dec. 18, 2008, Aguiar was dealt the first big case he’d met a family on, which included the death of four boys in a police chase in Louisville.
When he started doing litigation, he actually got to write the lawsuit and start working on the case. It was one of the slew of families that stayed with him after leaving Winters and Yonker.
That was his first exposure to a case against the police. The case took seven years, including two trips to the court of appeals.
Fast forward to 2014-15, Aguiar picked up another case regarding serious injury in police chase.
“We started to see some things in the inner workings of the police department that were tough,” Aguiar said. “We found out that a lot of lawyers just are apprehensive to take on the police department. We saw that after these police incidents take place that there’s a lot of collaboration amongst those in the police department to pin it on someone other than the police.”
From there on, Aguiar began to pick up more and more cases involving the police. He picked up a police pursuit case that involved a 16-year old girl burning to death, then he picked up a case regarding Darnell Wicker, who was shot and killed by police in 2016 and whose family received a $1.25 million settlement in January 2020.
Aguiar then picked up a case involving a jail assault against a man who was in handcuffs. The video went viral and eventually three correction officers were federally indicted.
Following that, he took on a case tackling targeted traffic stops. Aguiar said in other words, if a young black male had a nice car, he was pulled over and searched for drugs or guns because he fit the profile of a drug dealer. He was able to get those policies abolished.
And while Aguiar was able to continually resolve these cases, he noticed horrible patterns within all of them.
Then, when on vacation in Florida with fellow employees on March 13, Aguiar received a phone call from Taylor’s family.
“I got a call from the family that basically said ‘hey, our daughter got killed and we don’t know why and we want to figure out some answers,’” Aguiar said. “And of course you know you hear the initial story and we know a guy fired shots at the cops and they fired back and immediately your radar goes up and you’re like ‘well these cops are just going to claim self-defense.’ But the more they told us about Breonna and the type of person she was and about the atmosphere of the house and how it looked like a warzone, the more I just said ‘hey, we gotta look into this.”
When Aguiar returned, he went to visit the crime scene and was appalled at what he’d seen. With bullet holes dispersed all over the apartment and taking a look into the officers involved, they saw some immediate red flags.
But with the pandemic still raging on, the case didn’t receive much attention. However, after the Ahmaud Arbery case, in which he was shot jogging near his home in Georgia, there was national scrutiny regarding the murder.
Shortly after, a couple of activists let it be known that Taylor’s case was not being paid attention and the case picked up steam.
Lonita Baker, who went to law school with Aguiar and had been working with him since 2017, joined in Aguiar’s efforts on the case and immediately built a tremendous relationship with Taylor’s family.
Ben Crump, a critically acclaimed attorney who specializes in civil rights and catastrophic personal injury cases and has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, Martin Lee Anderson and is leading George Floyd’s family’s legal team, then reached out and said he also wanted to help with the case.
Forming a three-headed snake of attorneys, Aguiar, Baker and Crump went straight to work on the Taylor family’s case.
They filed the lawsuit in April in order to get subpoena power to bypass denials that prevented them from receiving the police investigative files.
In June and July, there were multiple hearings in which the judge sided in their favor and files began to be turned over to Aguiar and his legal team. As they continued to receive files, Aguiar continued to see red flags in the crime scene and investigation that let him know they could get anything they asked a jury for.
Aguiar recognized the killing was egregious and that even if the Attorney General and the FBI didn’t come back with charges, they had a strong civil lawsuit.
The case gained national attention over the summer when the WNBA dedicated its season to Taylor; NBA players dedicated their post-game interviews to her as well; and ‘Justice for Breonna’ protests erupted throughout the country.
This let Aguiar, Baker and Crump know that justice for Taylor was not the only endgame in this case—it was to help put the city back together, which couldn’t be done until there was a resolution for Taylor’s case in Aguiar’s eyes. Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, couldn’t have agreed more.
“Tamika Palmer, since day one, said that she wanted two things,” Aguiar said. “She wanted to know the truth about what happened to her daughter and she wanted to make sure that there was reform implemented that reduced the likelihood of any other mother having to go through what she went through.”
Aguiar said they’ve been digging for truth and gotten most of it and when the public hears it, it will make them sick to their stomach.
In order to help reflect change within the Louisville Police Department, the trio of attorneys proposed some legislation and ideas for the city to implement.
“We laid out a list of like 20 things,” Aguiar said. “We decided that like five of them the city would do if they could, but they can’t. It’s going to have to go through legislation, so we proposed some legislation. The other 15, we said ‘these are things that can happen now that will impact the way search warrants are conducted, that will promote public safety, that will establish integrity within the police department and will incentivize the police department to get more into the communities they actually patrol.”
Aguiar said they told the city from the beginning that if city officials were not willing to look at the police reform component of the proposal, then it was off the table.
After the proposal was made, the city approved 12 of the 15 action items they’d asked for.
“It took several weeks of back-and-forth to finalize it, but there was never much tension there,” Aguiar said. “The city was ready to start healing, the city was ready to acknowledge that the criminal case was going to do what the criminal case was going to do, but regardless, Breonna shouldn’t have gotten killed and there were violations of civil rights laws that led up to that. Any time you get a settlement they always put a clause that says ‘we don’t admit any fault,’ but let’s face it, they wouldn’t have paid $12 million dollars and given us 12 items of reform if they didn’t think they did anything wrong.”
In addition to letting the police chief go, initiatives for reform included:
- Police can’t avoid internal investigation by resignation, retirement or termination.
- They will implement an early action warning system, meaning that they have a way to identify red flags with their officers.
- All search warrants into a residence have to be reviewed and signed off by a commanding officer before it is presented to a judge.
- An ambulance and a paramedic must be stationed in the area of a forced entry search warrant due to the risk involved.
- Officers can be paid for two hours of community service within the divisions they work in in order to get them engaged with the community.
- An officer of inspector general—someone within the police department to investigate police officers—was hired.
- Officer-involved shootings will now have their investigations outsourced.
- Commanding officers have to review and sign off on the risk assessment matrix, a document that outlines all the risk factors for a warrant.
- The process of carrying out simultaneous search warrants will be changed. Separate people have to be assigned to each specific warrant in order to have someone on scene who knows what is supposed to happen.
- When currency is seized, it must be counted and sealed on camera with two people and then delivered to the property on camera with two people.
- The police department must establish housing credits for officers to give them an incentive to live in the community they patrol in. This would affect how they patrol the community through engagement with said community.
- A team of social workers will be hired to assist on dispatch runs, which is something other jurisdictions have implemented.
Along with reform, Aguiar said while his and Palmer’s goals were not mainly about money, he hopes this will help the city think twice before implementing more aggressive tactics in the future, because it will cost the city financially.
Despite completing the settlement, Aguiar was not overcome with joy right away. The thought of “did I leave something on the table” or whether the city would think Palmer was doing this for the wrong reasons sat in the back of his mind, not to mention the backlash from some citizens via social media after the announcement of the settlement.
However, after the press conference was held, in which Palmer spoke, the community seemed to back Taylor’s family.
“When we gave the press conference yesterday, after that people could really see the conviction with her, with the legal team and the city’s office, that this is just the first step,” Aguiar said. “That’s when all of a sudden the environment changed. Ultimately at the end of the day, it’s a phenomenal result, but if this is the only thing that comes out of Breonna Taylor’s killing, it is a tremendous failure.”
With the officers as the defendants in the civil case, the city had to evaluate the conduct of the officers when they were determining whether to settle the case. However, then the case was out of the city’s hands.
“We don’t have any leverage at the bargaining table to talk about charging the officers,” Aguiar said. “We did reiterate that we think these officers should be fired, but ultimately we’ve got a lot of state law protection on that too. We’ve got a really strong police unit and a really strong state law that affords too many protections to police officers.”
Though the officers not being fired is a let down to the trio of attorneys, Palmer feels good about the result of the settlement.
Aguiar sat down with Palmer on Monday to discuss the settlement before finalizing it, saying that reassurance was needed as she didn’t want to do anything that Taylor would not like, but in the end they finalized it with the understanding that it was one way to uphold Taylor’s legacy.
Going forward, the trio of attorneys and three law students have proposed legislation including rules about drug and alcohol tests being issued to officers after shootings, officers being terminated if something warrants it, that it be state law that all officers wear body cameras and that there be a statewide ban on no-knock search warrants despite the fact “Breonna’s Law” was passed by Louisville Council shortly after Taylor’s death.
And while the trio of attorneys and Palmer have brought forth such change with this settlement, Aguiar says it has to be made known this was an initiative made by a united stand amongst citizens across the country.
“I think what this case has revealed too is that peaceful protest, when done correctly, really does work,” Aguiar said. “Because I don’t want to sit here and suggest this was just Tamika Palmer, Lonita Baker, myself and Ben Crump. This was the entire country’s collective voice begging for change and demanding change that resulted in this.”
Aguiar said it’s amazing that they were able to do something really historic with this case, with one of the most talked about civil cases in recent memory.
“I think it’s a testament to having a conscience to being willing to fight the hard fight and doing things for the right reasons,” Aguiar said. “We never said we were going to go and be a civil rights firm to go get $12 million results, we said that we’re going to do civil rights cases because somebody needs to be a voice for these people.”
He said part of preventing incidents like Taylor’s in the future lies in continued reform, as well as making sure the younger generation is not raised into systemic racism, among other things.
He also said words aren’t enough to solve racism across the country with a black America that has been oppressed for over 400 years.
“I do think that reform is so critical,” Aguiar said. “You’ve gotta put people in office that aren’t going to have any tolerance for police corruption, for systemic racism, for oppressiveness, for poverty and you gotta find the right people that are going to do that. The problem that I have with politics right now is you hear a lot of words, but I’m an ‘action speaks louder than words’ kind of guy you know, so you can say all this and you can say all that, but do it.”