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Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 14-2862 

SENECA ADAMS and TARI ADAMS, 

Plaintiffs-Appellants, 

v.

CITY OF CHICAGO, et al., 

Defendants-Appellees. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. 

No. 06 C 4856 — Charles R. Norgle, Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED APRIL 13, 2015 — DECIDED AUGUST 14, 2015 

____________________ 

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, ROVNER, Circuit Judge, and 

SPRINGMANN, District Judge.* 

WOOD, Chief Judge. In 2004, Seneca and Tari Adams endured vicious beatings by Chicago police officers and prolonged detentions in the Cook County Jail. Along with their 

 

*Hon. Theresa L. Springmann of the Northern District of Indiana, sitting by designation. 

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sister, Sicara Adams, they sued the City of Chicago and the 

officers for various violations of their rights under federal 

and state law. The City admitted its liability to all three 

plaintiffs for false arrest, excessive force, and race discrimination; it also stipulated that it was liable to Seneca and Tari 

for malicious prosecution in violation of state law. That left 

damages for the jury, which returned sizeable awards to 

each of the Adams siblings. The district court entered an order reducing each award, but it failed to give the plaintiffs 

the option of a new trial in lieu of accepting the lower 

amount. Seneca and Tari Adams (the Adams brothers) have 

appealed. We conclude that the purported remittitur must 

be vacated and the case returned to the district court for reinstatement of the jury’s verdict in their favor. 

I 

Seneca, Tari, and Sicara Adams filed a complaint in federal court alleging various constitutional and state law violations against the City of Chicago and several Chicago police 

officers stemming from their arrests in 2004. They invoked 

federal-question jurisdiction for their claims under 42 U.S.C. 

§§ 1983 and 1985, see 28 U.S.C. § 1331, and supplemental jurisdiction for their state-law claims, see 28 U.S.C. § 1367. 

As we noted, all three plaintiffs reached an agreement 

with the City on the question of liability and proceeded to 

trial before a jury on damages. The jury awarded $2.4 million to Seneca, $1 million to Tari, and $300,000 to Sicara. The 

district court announced that it was “remitting” those 

amounts to $1.17 million for Seneca, $350,000 for Tari, and 

$125,000 for Sicara; it did not give any of them the option of 

rejecting the reduction and having a new trial. Only the Adams brothers have appealed. 

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II 

Before turning to the merits of the appeal, we explain 

why appellate jurisdiction is secure. A true remittitur order 

gives the winning party a choice: he may either accept a specific reduced monetary award or he may opt for a new trial. 

See Dimick v. Schiedt, 293 U.S. 474, 482–83 (1935). Ordinarily, 

a plaintiff who accepts a reduced award may not appeal 

from the court’s decision to cut back on the jury’s verdict. 

Donovan v. Penn Shipping Co., 429 U.S. 648, 649 (1977). If instead the plaintiff rejects the remittitur and chooses a new 

trial, then appeal is possible, but it must await the conclusion 

of the second trial. See 11 CHARLES ALAN WRIGHT et al., 

FEDERAL PRACTICE & PROCEDURE § 2818 at 244 (3d ed. 2012). 

These rules, taken together, might make it seem as if appellate jurisdiction is lacking here. But our plaintiffs never 

agreed to the reduction in their award, and they were never 

offered the option of a new trial. Instead, the court simply 

took the jury’s verdicts and slashed them. This was certainly 

an action that adversely affected the plaintiffs’ legal rights, 

and thus they were entitled to bring an appeal to this court. 

See Ash v. Georgia-Pacific Corp., 957 F.2d 432, 438 (7th Cir. 

1992). 

III 

If this were an ordinary remittitur order, we would review it for abuse of discretion. Pickett v. Sheridan Health Care 

Ctr., 610 F.3d 434, 446 (7th Cir. 2010). In this case, however, 

we face two questions: first, whether the form of the order 

was authorized; and second, whether the jury’s verdicts 

should have been disturbed. The former is a legal issue for 

which de novo review is called for; the latter is a matter we 

review for abuse of discretion. 

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It is plain (and the parties agree) that the district court 

erred when it failed to offer the Adams siblings the option of 

a new trial. The harder question is what to do about that error. The Adams brothers argue that we should vacate the 

court’s “remittitur” and order it to reinstate the jury verdict. 

Relying on the rule that a plaintiff may not appeal an order 

granting remittitur and offering a new trial, see Seltzner v. 

RDK Corp., 756 F.2d 51, 52 (7th Cir. 1985); see also Kelly v. 

Moore, 376 F.3d 481, 483 (5th Cir. 2004), the City’s opening 

gambit is that the appeal should be dismissed for want of 

appellate jurisdiction. We already have explained why we 

do not agree with that position. Otherwise, the City argues 

that the Adams brothers are asking us to allow them to skip 

the step of having to choose between a remitted verdict and 

a new trial. Such a ruling, the City contends, would put the 

brothers in a better position than they would have been in 

had the judge properly given them the choice of a new trial 

or a remittitur. It concludes that at most, we should vacate 

the district court’s order and remand to give the Adams 

brothers the choice they should have had before, between a 

new trial and the lower amount of damages. 

This is not the first time we have encountered the situation in which a trial judge failed to give a winning plaintiff 

the option of a new trial in lieu of a remittitur. The same 

thing happened in McKinnon v. City of Berwyn, 750 F.2d 1383 

(7th Cir. 1984). There we held that the failure to offer a new 

trial was error, because “[t]he Seventh Amendment reserves 

the determination of damages, in jury trials within its scope, 

to the jury.” Id. at 1392. We concluded that “[t]he proper corrective is to give [the plaintiff] the choice he was improperly 

denied, between accepting the remittitur and having a new 

trial on damages.” Id. (citation omitted). 

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But there is a critical difference between McKinnon and 

the present case. In McKinnon, the plaintiff did not argue 

“that the judge abused his discretion in finding the damages 

excessive”; he contended only that “the judge violated proper procedure in failing to give [him] the option of a new trial 

in lieu of the remittitur.” Id. at 1391. It therefore made sense 

that the solution to a procedural problem was a procedural 

fix. In our case, the Adams brothers have not confined themselves to the procedural point. They argue instead that the 

district judge committed two errors: first, that the judge’s 

procedure was wrong; and second, that the judge abused his 

discretion in concluding that the damages were so excessive 

that a remittitur was proper. That puts Seneca and Tari Adams in precisely the position we contemplated in Ash, 957 

F.2d at 438. There we reasoned that if “the court had 

chopped down [the plaintiff]’s verdict without permitting a 

new trial, [the plaintiff] would have had no choice to make 

and could have appealed straightaway.” Id. Once we reach 

that point, the issue is straightforward: was it an abuse of 

discretion to reduce the verdicts? 

In deciding whether a damages award is excessive, three 

factors guide our analysis: “whether (1) the award is monstrously excessive; (2) there is no rational connection between the award and the evidence, indicating that it is merely a product of the jury’s fevered imaginings or personal 

vendettas; and (3) whether the award is roughly comparable 

to awards made in similar cases.” G.G. v. Grindle, 665 F.3d 

795, 798 (7th Cir. 2011) (citation omitted). 

A monstrously excessive verdict is one that is “a product 

of passion and prejudice.” Fleming v. Cnty. of Kane, 898 F.2d 

553, 561 (7th Cir. 1990) (quotation marks and citation omitCase: 14-2862 Document: 44 Filed: 08/14/2015 Pages: 12
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ted). We have observed that the “monstrously excessive” 

standard and the “rational connection” standard are really 

just two ways of describing the same inquiry: whether the 

jury verdict was irrational. See Harvey v. Office of Banks & Real Estate, 377 F.3d 698, 713–14 (7th Cir. 2004); EEOC v. AIC 

Sec. Investigations, Ltd., 55 F.3d 1276, 1285 n.13 (7th Cir. 1995). 

In order to determine whether the jury’s verdict was irrational, the district court must review the trial record as a 

whole in the light most favorable to the verdict. This perspective is essential, if we are to preserve the jury’s role as 

the trier of fact. The issue before the jury, and thus the issue 

before the district court, is whether there was enough evidence to show that the awards of $2.4 million and $1 million 

were rationally related to both the physical and verbal harassment the police inflicted on Seneca and Tari, and their 

prolonged detention in the Cook County Jail. See Farfaras v. 

Citizens Bank & Trust of Chicago, 433 F.3d 558, 566 (7th Cir. 

2006). 

It is entirely possible that another jury might have evaluated the Adams brothers’ damages more modestly, but that 

is not the standard. Upon reviewing the record, we find ample evidence to support the jury’s verdicts. The jury heard 

testimony from Seneca Adams that, after lying on the 

ground in compliance with the police officer’s command, 

one officer kicked him in the face. Thereafter, Seneca reported, the following sequence of events occurred: (1) he was 

pushed onto the hood of the squad car and punched in the 

face; (2) neighbors as well as his four-year-old niece Ciara 

witnessed the beating; and (3) when he asked the police not 

to beat him up in front of his niece, one officer responded, “I 

don’t give a fuck about you or your nigger niece” and hit 

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him again in the face. The beatings were severe enough to 

cause Seneca to bleed all over his face and from his mouth. 

Seneca testified that, once forced into the squad car, he was 

punched in the face, grabbed by the hair, and thrown against 

the window, only to be driven around and repeatedly beaten 

up until the police took him to the hospital. There, after a 

CAT scan, he received nine stiches over his left eye and under his right eye. Seneca also testified that the officer who 

punched him was wearing weighted gloves. In the end, the 

beatings resulted in permanent scarring over his left eye and 

under his right eye. Seneca testified that during the beatings, 

the officers used racial slurs including “fuckin’ monkey” and 

“fuckin’ nigger.” The jury also heard testimony about Seneca’s 204-day detention in the Cook County Jail for crimes for 

which he was either initially found not guilty or which were 

later vacated and expunged. 

Tari’s treatment at the hands of Chicago police officers 

was not much better, again according to evidence the jury 

heard. Tari witnessed Seneca’s beating on the hood of the 

squad car. After the police drove away with Seneca, Tari and 

Sicara got into Sicara’s car to find their brother. They approached the police cars near the Cook County Jail at 26th 

and California, asked an officer what had happened to their 

brother, and were met with obscenities. An officer then 

reached into the car trying to shift the gear and in the process punched Tari. Tari drove off and stopped his car at a 

stoplight at 31st and California, only to have a police car ram 

the driver’s side door with enough force to shatter glass and 

leave a hole in the door. As he climbed out of the other side 

of the car, the police tackled him, handcuffed him, and put 

him in the squad car for hours. As they had done with Seneca, the police drove Tari around, beating him up—including 

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in between hospital visits. Tari wound up at a different hospital, where medical staff ran a CAT scan and checked him 

for broken bones. The scan came back normal, and Tari received no further treatment. He did, however, sustain cuts 

inside his jaw, and his face, lips, and left eye were swollen. 

Tari was detained in Cook County Jail for 45 days. 

Finally, the jury heard testimony from Sicara that when 

she saw Seneca the night of the incident, his face was “unrecognizable.” She also saw Tari in a hospital gown with 

blood on it. Sicara testified that both brothers were fundamentally changed by the incident: Seneca went from being a 

“happy person” to someone who was “obsessed about what 

happened to him” and Tari was “not as trusting” or “as freehearted as he used to be.” Seneca himself testified that he 

had become paranoid. Both brothers said that they had 

moved to Arizona, in part because they did not feel safe in 

Chicago. Tari added that he still gets nervous around police. 

In reviewing the jury’s verdict, the district court should 

have kept in mind that liability was a given: the City conceded liability for all violations of both Seneca and Tari’s 

rights under federal and state law. It is also telling that the 

jury’s awards to the three siblings are internally consistent. It 

gave Seneca the most; Tari an intermediate amount; and Sicara (who has not even appealed) the least. This indicates that 

the jury saw that the physical harm suffered by the brothers 

varied, that the long-lasting emotional harm each sibling suffered was different, and that the periods of wrongful confinement in the Cook County Jail for the two brothers called 

for different awards. 

One troubling feature of the court’s rationale for reducing the verdicts was its apparent reliance on its own general 

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knowledge of the Cook County Jail. The district court seized 

on the fact that the Adams brothers’ lawyer in his closing 

argument at trial made admittedly inappropriate remarks 

about the Cook County Jail, calling the inmates “animals” 

and that he wouldn’t wish them “on anybody except the 

murderers, rapists, violent criminals who should be there.” 

That isolated statement convinced the judge that the jury 

award could only have been the “product of the jury's fevered imaginings or personal vendetta.” Farfaras, 433 F.3d at 

566 (quoting AIC Sec. Investigations, Ltd., 55 F.3d at 1285). But 

the record contained far more than counsel’s overblown argument. We note as well that the court gave the jury the 

usual instruction warning it that arguments of counsel are 

not evidence—an instruction we routinely assume the jury 

follows. 

The only question is whether counsel’s statement was so 

inflammatory that it guaranteed there could be no connection between the evidence and the award given to the jury. 

The judge went to great lengths to point out that Seneca and 

Tari experienced little adversity in the jail, and that “convicted felons in Illinois serve their time in the Illinois Department of Corrections and not in the Cook County Jail.” The 

latter point is inaccurate, if it was meant to describe every 

inmate in the Jail. IDOC prisoners are, in fact, routinely 

housed there. Whether or not Seneca and Tari were detained 

in the same part of the jail as the IDOC prisoners is not the 

point. The problem is that the judge substituted his own assumptions about the hardships of their wrongful detention 

for that of the jury. That was error. Viewed from the proper 

perspective, there was ample evidence to support the jury’s 

damage awards, and counsel’s closing argument, even if error, does not change that. 

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After reviewing the record, the court should have looked 

at past decisions to see if the awards were “out of line with 

other awards in similar cases.” Fleming, 898 F.2d at 561 (citations omitted). This, however, is not as important as the review of the evidence in the case at hand; it offers at best a 

rough approximation of damage awards. The problem, well 

illustrated by the briefs in this case, is that one can always 

find excessive force cases with verdicts at different levels. 

This amounts to anecdotal evidence at best. Even that kind 

of evidence might show that it is hard to find a single case 

with damages as high as the one before the court (or as low, 

if the appeal is taken from an allegedly inadequate verdict), 

but caution should be the byword when looking at past 

awards. 

That is especially so because in comparing past decisions 

to the jury award at issue, “an exact analogy is not necessary.” Farfaras, 433 F.3d at 566. Rather, “[a]wards in other 

cases provide a reference point that assists the court in assessing reasonableness; they do not establish a range beyond 

which awards are necessarily excessive.” Id. (citation and 

quotation marks omitted). To require that a jury’s damages 

award be no bigger than previous awards in similar cases 

would make every such award ripe for remittitur. There 

must be room for a jury’s award to exceed the relevant range 

of cases when the facts warrant. 

A comparison of the Adams brothers’ verdicts and others 

does not suggest that they were outliers. A different judge 

from the same district court upheld a compensatory damages award greater than $2.4 million for excessive force. Ibanez 

v. Velasco, No. 96 C 5990, 2002 WL 731778, at *10 (N.D. Ill. 

Apr. 25, 2002). The City says that Ibanez is different, because 

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the plaintiff there (unlike the Adams brothers) had evidence 

of persistent medical issues and medical experts testified to 

the plaintiff’s injuries. On the other hand, the claims in 

Ibanez were only for excessive force and failure to intervene 

to prevent excessive force, while here the theories included 

false arrest, excessive force, race discrimination, and malicious prosecution. 

Smith v. City of Oakland, 538 F. Supp. 2d 1217 (N.D. Cal. 

2008), also bolsters the Adams brothers’ position. There, the 

judge remitted a verdict from $5 million to $3 million, but 

the plaintiff was detained in jail for four and a half months. 

Id. at 1241. Seneca was detained for nearly seven. Moreover, 

Smith’s award of $3 million neatly tracks Tari’s award of $1 

million for 46 days of detention plus excessive force, false 

arrest, and race discrimination. See also Jones v. City of Chicago, 856 F.2d 985, 988 (7th Cir. 1988) (upholding jury award of 

$801,000 (equivalent to $1.6 million in 2015 dollars) in compensatory and punitive damages for a plaintiff alleging false 

arrest, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional 

distress, and malicious prosecution). 

To be sure, there are cases where people suffered worse 

physical injuries and received smaller awards than the appellants here. See, e.g., Niehus v. Liberio, 973 F.2d 526 (7th Cir. 

1992). And there are also cases where plaintiffs received 

much larger awards for much longer periods of unlawful 

detention. See, e.g., Dominguez v. Hendley, 545 F.3d 585 (7th 

Cir. 2008). Nonetheless, we see nothing to undermine this 

jury’s awards of $2.4 million and $1 million—amounts that 

lie well within the universe of excessive force and malicious 

prosecution verdicts. 

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IV 

Relying on some recent scholarship, the Adams brothers 

have also argued that the practice of remittitur violates the 

Seventh Amendment. See Suja A. Thomas, Re-Examining the 

Constitutionality of Remittitur Under the Seventh Amendment, 

64 OHIO ST. L.J. 731, 747–50 (2003). In light of our conclusions 

with respect to the court’s failure to offer the new-trial option and the impropriety of disturbing the jury’s verdict, we 

have no reason to reach this point. We cannot resist observing, however, that it would be bold indeed for a court of appeals to come to such a conclusion, given what the Supreme 

Court has said on the topic. See, e.g., Gebser v. Lago Vista Indep. Sch. Dist., 524 U.S. 274, 302 n.12 (1998) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (citation omitted) (noting that “[t]he lower courts 

are not powerless to control the size of damages verdicts” 

because they “retain the power to order a remittitur”); Hetzel 

v. Prince William Cnty., 523 U.S. 208, 211 (1998); Dimick, supra; 

but see Browning-Ferris Indus. of Vermont, Inc. v. Kelco Disposal, Inc., 492 U.S. 257, 280 n.25 (1989) (noting that the Court 

has “never held expressly that the Seventh Amendment allows appellate review of a district court’s denial of a motion 

to set aside an award as excessive”). 

Although the court erred by failing to give the winning 

plaintiffs the option of a new trial, the remedy here is not a 

remand to re-run the remittitur procedure. We agree with 

the Adams brothers that the district court abused its discretion by modifying the jury’s verdicts in their favor. We 

therefore VACATE the district court’s judgments in their cases 

and REMAND with instructions to reinstate the jury’s verdict. 

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