$245,000 Awarded in Civil Rights Suit Against Torrance Police
Three young men were awarded $245,000 in punitive damages Wednesday after they won a federal lawsuit filed nearly three years ago maintaining that two Torrance police officers violated their civil rights.
Dan Mason, Lohren Price and Nicholas Cramer, all 17 at the time of the incident, were driving through Torrance after seeing a movie to celebrate graduating from a prestigious Studio City prep school.
On their way toward Inglewood, where two of the students lived, they were stopped, ordered from the car at gunpoint, patted down and made to sit on the sidewalk while two police officers, Louis Kramer and Steven Danjou, searched their car for nearly an hour, the lawsuit said.
The result was citations for not wearing a seat belt and for a defective turn signal, which later were dismissed.
The three students maintained that the only reason they were stopped was because two of them were African American and one was white, said Howard R. Price, attorney for two of the plaintiffs.
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