I. The Limits of Criminal Justice
When a police officer causes the death of a civilian, there is a natural and understandable impulse to view the criminal justice system as the arena where accountability will be delivered. If the officer is charged, tried, and convicted, the public narrative tends to close: justice has been served. The officer goes to prison. The case is over. But this understanding, while emotionally satisfying, is fundamentally incomplete. Criminal justice and civil justice serve different purposes, answer different questions, and reach different actors. Understanding the distinction between these two systems is essential to understanding why the death of Emily Gaines—an eighteen-year-old killed by a speeding police officer on his way to a non-emergency charity event—demands more than what the criminal courts alone can provide.
The criminal justice system asks a narrow question: did this individual commit a crime? It evaluates the defendant's conduct against the elements of a statute. It assigns guilt or innocence. And when guilt is established, it imposes punishment—incarceration, probation, fines. What it does not do, and what it is not designed to do, is examine the institutional failures that made the crime possible. It does not ask whether the officer's department had adequate policies governing vehicle speed during non-emergency operations. It does not ask whether the municipality trained its officers to distinguish between emergency responses and routine travel. It does not ask whether supervisors knew about patterns of reckless driving and chose to look the other way. These are the questions that only civil litigation can answer.
In the Gaines case, the officer who killed Emily was criminally convicted. That conviction is a matter of public record, and it represents an important acknowledgment by the State of Oklahoma that his conduct was not merely negligent but criminal. Yet that conviction, standing alone, changes nothing about the policies of the Moore Police Department. It changes nothing about the training protocols that governed how officers operated their vehicles. It changes nothing about the institutional culture that allowed an officer to drive at excessive speeds to a scheduled charity event without anyone in his chain of command questioning whether that behavior was consistent with public safety. The criminal conviction punishes the officer. Civil litigation is designed to change the system.
II. The Constitutional Framework: Section 1983 and the Conscience of the Court
The primary vehicle for holding government actors accountable when they violate constitutional rights is 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a Reconstruction-era statute that Congress enacted to provide citizens with a federal cause of action against state officials who deprive them of rights secured by the Constitution. In the context of police-involved deaths, § 1983 claims typically arise under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process—the principle that the government may not exercise its power in ways that are arbitrary, oppressive, or shocking to the conscience.
The "shocks the conscience" standard, as articulated by the Supreme Court in County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833 (1998), is both the foundation and the principal obstacle in police accountability cases. It requires a plaintiff to demonstrate that the officer's conduct was so egregious, so fundamentally at odds with the norms of a civilized society, that it transcends ordinary negligence and enters the realm of constitutional violation. The standard is demanding, but it is not insurmountable—particularly when an officer acts without any legitimate law enforcement purpose. When a sworn officer exercises the authority of the state in a manner wholly disconnected from the duties that justify that authority, and a civilian dies as a result, the conscience of the court is properly engaged.
The Tenth Circuit's decision in Browder v. City of Albuquerque, 787 F.3d 1076 (10th Cir. 2015), provides the most directly relevant precedent for cases involving officers who cause fatal collisions while driving at dangerous speeds for non-emergency purposes. In Browder, an Albuquerque police sergeant finished his shift, activated his emergency lights, and drove his marked cruiser at high speeds through city streets—running red lights and treating the roadway as if the rules that govern every other motorist simply did not apply to him. He was not responding to a call. He was not pursuing a suspect. He was driving home. He struck a civilian vehicle, killing one occupant and severely injuring another. The Tenth Circuit held that this conduct was "the very model" of arbitrary government action—the precise type of behavior that the Fourteenth Amendment's substantive due process clause was designed to prohibit. The court denied the officer qualified immunity, allowing the case to proceed to trial.
The significance of Browder extends far beyond its specific facts. It establishes a doctrinal framework within the Tenth Circuit—the federal appellate court that governs Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—for evaluating cases where officers misuse government vehicles at lethal speeds for purposes wholly disconnected from any legitimate law enforcement function. The opinion makes clear that when an officer acts outside the scope of any recognized governmental purpose, the traditional deference that courts afford to split-second police decisions in the heat of pursuit or emergency response does not apply. There is no pursuit. There is no emergency. There is only an officer who chose to drive as though the laws he swore to enforce did not apply to him.
III. Why Civil Accountability Matters
Emily Gaines was eighteen years old. She was on her way to take the ACT—the standardized test that would shape her path to college. She was doing exactly what her family, her community, and her country asked of her. She was preparing for the future. And that future was taken from her by a police officer who was driving to a charity event at a speed that no charity event could justify, without activating emergency equipment, and without any legitimate law enforcement purpose behind the wheel. The officer was criminally convicted. He went to prison. But the system that produced him—the department that trained him, the city that employed him, the policies that either failed to restrain him or were never enforced—remained intact.
This is why civil accountability matters. Not because criminal prosecution is unimportant, but because it is incomplete. Criminal law looks backward. It evaluates a single act by a single actor and assigns punishment. Civil law looks forward. It asks the questions that a criminal proceeding was never designed to ask—and it creates consequences that reach the individual officer in ways that a prison sentence alone cannot. A civil verdict tells the officer, the department, and the public that the constitutional rights of every citizen on that roadway mattered, and that the violation of those rights carries a cost measured not only in years served but in accountability rendered.
The legal hurdles in these cases are real. Qualified immunity, the doctrine that shields government officials from liability unless they violated "clearly established" law, remains a barrier in many police misconduct cases. The "shocks the conscience" standard requires plaintiffs to demonstrate conduct that rises above ordinary negligence. These obstacles are significant. And they are the reason that cases of this nature require attorneys who understand not just the law, but the discipline of building a record that meets those standards and holds individual officers to account for the choices they made.
The Tenth Circuit, in Browder, drew a line. It held that when an officer misuses the instruments of state power for purposes that serve no legitimate governmental function, and a civilian dies as a result, the officer is not shielded by the deference that courts ordinarily afford to law enforcement. The court recognized what common sense demands: that there is a fundamental difference between an officer who makes a split-second decision in the chaos of pursuit and an officer who simply decides that the rules do not apply to him. The former deserves the benefit of the doubt. The latter deserves the full weight of the law.
Emily Gaines deserved to arrive at her test that morning. Her family deserved to see her walk through the door that evening. The civil justice system cannot give them that. No system can. But what it can do—what it is uniquely designed to do—is ask the questions that the criminal courts were never built to answer. It can examine the policies. It can interrogate the training. It can expose the institutional culture. And it can impose consequences that reach beyond the individual officer and into the structure of the institution itself, so that the next eighteen-year-old driving to a test, the next mother waiting at home, the next family preparing for a future, has a better chance of arriving safely. That is not vengeance. That is not punishment. That is the purpose of the civil justice system. And it is the promise that Emily Gaines's case demands we keep.
IV. The Gaines Verdict and the Work Behind It
Hicks Law Firm represented the Gaines family from the filing of the civil action through trial. The case required years of sustained litigation—depositions of the defendant officer, members of his chain of command, and departmental decision-makers whose testimony would either confirm or contradict the narrative that this tragedy was an isolated failure rather than a foreseeable consequence of institutional neglect. The depositions were not formalities. They were the mechanism by which the factual record was built, the inconsistencies were exposed, and the foundation for trial was laid.
Throughout the course of the litigation, the firm secured critical rulings from the court that shaped the contours of the case. Pretrial motions in civil rights actions of this complexity are not incidental—they determine what evidence the jury will hear, what legal theories will survive, and what standard of accountability the court will apply. The rulings obtained in the Gaines litigation allowed the family's claims to be presented to a jury on terms that reflected the full weight of the evidence the firm had assembled.
In April 2026, a jury returned a verdict of $126 million in favor of the Gaines family—the largest civil rights verdict in Oklahoma history. That number was not arrived at lightly. It reflected the jury's assessment of what was lost: the full measure of a life that had barely begun, the relationship between a daughter and the family that raised her, and the gravity of an officer's decision to treat the public roadway as though no one else on it mattered. The verdict was not a windfall. It was a reckoning.
The outcome in the Gaines case did not happen because the facts were simple. It happened because the work was thorough—because every deposition was taken with purpose, every motion was briefed with precision, and every argument at trial was grounded in a record that had been built over years of disciplined preparation. That is the standard the firm applies to every case it accepts.
If you or your family have been affected by the actions of a law enforcement officer, and you believe the civil justice system may offer a path that the criminal courts cannot, we welcome the opportunity to hear from you. You may reach Hicks Law Firm at (405) 759-0515 or through our contact page. Consultations are confidential, and there is no fee unless we are able to help.