JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The family of a pedestrian killed by a troubled Jacksonville police officer is suing the city, saying his civil rights were violated and that a $314,687 estimated bill for police records broke state law.
Blane Land, 62, died in May 2017 when he was hit by a patrol car driven by Officer Timothy James.
The officer was arrested the following month for beating a handcuffed teenage boy he said spat on him, culminating a string of problems James experienced that led to 11 investigations of him in a three-year Sheriff’s Office career.
Prosecutors dropped misdemeanor battery charges in 2018 after James reached an agreement that he wouldn’t work as a police officer in Duval, Clay or Nassau counties until at least this summer.
The lawsuit filed this week in federal court on behalf of Land’s mother, Barbara Land, and her dead husband, argued the Sheriff’s Office “protected … Officer James as an officer and also prevented plaintiffs from obtaining records related to his misconduct."
The suit replaces one filed in state court in 2018 and calls James an "egregious example of repeated officer misconduct." It claims the conduct fit into a pattern of “substantive due process violations” that represented a civil rights violation.
The suit, filed against James, Sheriff Mike Williams and the city, said Williams “permitted, encouraged, tolerated and ratified a pattern of unjustified, unreasonable and illegal use of force” by officers.
City attorneys haven’t responded yet to the suit.
James struck Land with his patrol car while heading to a reported robbery the night of May 10, 2017, as Land was crossing University Boulevard east of Philips Highway.
The suit says Land’s family tried to find information about the collision and about James, but says the "punitive" Sheriff’s Office response to their request for public records violated state law. Attorney John Phillips wrote in the complaint that a response to the family’s records request addressed to him was shared with reporters before it was delivered to him. Records that have been provided to reporters haven’t been provided to the family, the suit says.
The suit argues police also caused emotional distress to Land’s family by giving false descriptions of the wreck where he died, suggesting the night Land died that the collision might have been suicide. The point mirrors comments Land’s family made months after his death, when a sister told the Times-Union that “it’s like they killed him twice.”
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