Jury Awards $340,000 to Fired Officer

SANTA ANA — Capping a five-year effort to restore his reputation, a former Anaheim police officer Thursday was awarded $340,000 in damages by a jury to compensate him for being fired in retaliation for reporting two separate instances of alleged police brutality.

The jury deliberated for less than three hours before deciding on the amount of economic and emotional damages to be awarded to Steve Nolan, ending a month-long civil trial in Orange County Superior Court.

Three days earlier, the jury had rejected the city’s claims that Nolan, 34, was fired for insubordination and other disciplinary reasons, instead believing he was being penalized for breaking an unwritten “code of silence” among officers.

“You have no idea how difficult it is to break that code of silence,” Nolan said Thursday. “People will tell you that it doesn’t exist, but it does exist. It’s a way of life.”

Nolan and his lawyers said later they believe that his allegations are not the only instances of excessive force that have been tolerated or covered up by Anaheim police over the years.

“I think the city of Anaheim still has a lot of skeletons in the closet and those skeletons will be walking out in the next year,” said Steven R. Pingel, one of Nolan’s attorneys.

But the city remained steadfastly unrepentant Thursday.

“Something that is not broken is not going to be fixed,” said attorney Richard M. Kreisler, who represented Anaheim during the trial.

“The way this department delivers service to the community is without peer,” Kreisler said.

“I think the most important thing to realize is that this case was never a referendum on the Anaheim Police Department,” he said. “This was an employee-employer dispute. This is not an excessive force case.”

Although jurors determined that Nolan should receive compensation for past economic losses, they did not believe the contention by Nolan’s attorneys that he was incapable of reviving his career elsewhere.

“We mostly looked at past damages and not future damages,” said juror Cristie Chastain. “Mr. Nolan could possibly get a job in another area and get a job comparable to the one he had.”

While finding Nolan to be “a believable person,” Chastain said the jury felt that he had not tried hard enough to find other work during the years that it took for his case to reach trial.

The economic damages of $160,000 the jury awarded Nolan reflect what the former officer would have earned, had he not been fired. They awarded Nolan $180,000 for the emotional distress brought on by the termination.

Nolan’s lawsuit, filed in May 1995, is based on a section of the state labor code that prohibits an employer from retaliating against an employee for disclosing information the employee believes violates the law.