Monell Claims

The majority of civil rights violations are committed by individual officers. However, our law also allows the municipal entity to be brought into the suit under certain circumstances.

That matters because the officer is rarely the whole story. Where a policy, a practice or a failure to train made the violation possible, the town itself can be answerable for it.

A Monell claim usually runs alongside the underlying civil rights claim — an excessive force, false arrest or failure to intervene case against the officers involved.

Successfully prosecuting a claim against a municipality under the theory of Monell liability is a very technical fact intensive exercise.

Proving a policy, a custom or a training failure means going well past the incident itself — into records, patterns and what the town knew before it happened.

At The Law Offices of Joel Silberman, LLC one of our primary goals is to ensure that municipalities are held responsible for the unlawful acts of their officers.