Man sues Florida officers who severely beat him after foot chase

A Florida man filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against three Jacksonville sheriff's officers who severely beat him last year after he ran from a traffic stop, alleging they used excessive force that resulted in permanent injuries to his head, an eye and a kidney.

Le’Keian Woods, who said he still suffers migraines and eye pain, is suing Jacksonville officers Hunter Sullivan, Trey McCullough and former officer Josue Garriga for their roles in the Sept. 29, 2023, beating that drew national attention and local protests for its severity. Sheriff T.K. Waters has defended the beating as justified.

The beating left Woods with a ruptured kidney, a swollen face and bloodied lip. A fourth officer, Beau Daigle, is being sued for pointing his gun at Woods, who is seeking unspecified damages.

Attorneys Harry Daniels and Norman Harris accused the officers of targeting Woods, 25, and the two friends he was with because they are Black. They said the officers used the driver's failure to wear his seat belt as a pretext to pull over their pickup truck at gunpoint after Garriga claimed he'd seen Woods sell cocaine to a man at a gas station. The cocaine accusation was later dropped.

“This is a clear case of a miscarriage of justice and racial profiling,” Harris said. “This is not a case where law enforcement saw young men who have warrants for violent offense allegations. This is a case where a stop was concocted based off a seat-belt violation and the officers got out with guns drawn.”

While his two friends complied with the officers' demands to remain in the truck with their hands visible, Woods bolted.

“I got kind of scared that he was going to shoot me, that I had a serious situation, so I ran,” said Woods, who was on probation for robbery.

Body camera video shows Sullivan chasing Woods, yelling he would shoot Woods with his Taser if he didn't stop. When Sullivan got close enough, he shot Woods twice with the stun gun and Woods fell on his face. Sullivan, Garriga and McCullough punched, elbowed and kneed him in the head and body as they tried to get him handcuffed.

Woods, who is 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 160 pounds (1.7 meters and 72 kilograms), squirmed and sometimes put one hand or the other behind his back, but then moved the other beneath him. The much-larger officers said they feared he was reaching for a gun. It took them two minutes to get Woods into handcuffs.

Daniels, a former police officer, said, in Florida, kneeing a suspect in the head is considered lethal force, the legal equivalent of shooting someone. It is only to be used if a life is endangered. He said federal and state lawsuits will be filed later against the sheriff's office.

The sheriff's office declined comment Thursday and the Jacksonville Fraternal Order of Police, the officers' union, did not return a call seeking comment.

At a press conference three days after Woods' arrest, Sheriff Waters, who is Black, said the body camera videos proved the beating was necessary to keep Woods from harming the officers.

“Just because force is ugly does not mean it is unlawful,” Waters said then. He said no officers would be disciplined.

The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division cleared the officers, saying their actions “did not rise” to a level where they could be prosecuted under federal law. Daniels said the department didn't do a proper investigation and the decision will be appealed.

Woods was originally charged with resisting arrest with violence, armed trafficking in cocaine and methamphetamine and other felonies.

But in April, six months after his arrest, prosecutors dropped those charges. He pleaded guilty to resisting arrest without violence for running from the truck and was sentenced to nine days in jail he had already served. Garriga hadn't recorded Woods' alleged sale on his video cameras and no other officers saw it.

“Running from the truck is the only crime he committed that day,” said Nicole Jamieson, Woods' criminal defense attorney, in a Thursday telephone interview. Just because the officers were yelling at Woods to stop resisting arrest as they beat him doesn't mean he actually was, she said.

Garriga, 34, couldn't testify against Woods because earlier this year he pleaded guilty to federal charges that he'd had sex with a 17-year-old girl. He will receive a sentence of between 10 years and life at a hearing scheduled for Nov. 18.

In 2019, Garriga fatally shot a man in a traffic stop over an unbuckled seat belt. Prosecutors found the shooting was justified, and a lawsuit filed by the dead man’s family was later settled for an undisclosed amount. Daniels was the family’s attorney.

Sullivan and his father, who is also a Jacksonville sheriff's officer, were suspended in 2020 after they got into an off-duty fight with a woman at a bar. No criminal charges were filed.

At the time of the beating, Woods was on probation after pleading no contest to a 2017 Tallahassee robbery where he and his roommate tried to stick up an illegal marijuana dealer at gunpoint.

The dealer pulled his own gun and fatally shot the roommate as Woods fled. Woods was originally charged with second-degree murder in his roommate’s death, but a plea bargain was reached in 2022 that released him without prison time.

In this image taken from video from police a body worn camera, a Jacksonville sheriff's officer holds down Le’Keian Woods while pointing a stun gun at him following a traffic stop on Sept. 29, 2023, in Jacksonville, Fla. (WJXT via AP)

FILE - Legal team member Harry M. Daniels speaks during a media press conference while, from left, legal team member Roderick Taylor, in suit, Natassia Woods, the mother of Le'Keian Woods, and legal team member Marwan Porter listen, Oct. 3, 2023, on the steps of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in Jacksonville, Fla. (Corey Perrine/The Florida Times-Union via AP, File)

FILE - This image taken from Jacksonville Sheriff's Office body camera video shows a police officer tasing Le'Keian Woods as Woods flees a traffic stop, Sept. 29, 2023, in Jacksonville, Fla. (Jacksonville Sheriff's Office via AP, File)

In this image taken from from video, attorney Harry Daniels representing Le’Keian Woods, second from right, who filed a federal lawsuit against three Jacksonville sheriff's officers who severely beat him last year after he ran from a traffic stop, alleging they used excessive force that resulted in permanent injuries to his head, an eye and a kidney, speaks during a news conference, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (WJXT via AP)

In this image taken from from video, Le’Keian Woods, who filed a federal lawsuit against three Jacksonville sheriff's officers who severely beat him last year after he ran from a traffic stop, alleging they used excessive force that resulted in permanent injuries to his head, an eye and a kidney, speaks during a news conference, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (WJXT via AP)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republicans wasted no time in appealing a Pennsylvania court decision that would relax the rules for mail ballots, asking the state Supreme Court on Thursday to reverse a lower-court opinion issued one day earlier.

The state and national GOP filed an emergency request that that justices put on hold a Commonwealth Court ruling that envelopes voters use to send in mail ballots don't need to have been accurately hand-dated, as required under state law.

The Republican groups said that if the high court does not stay the order it should at least modify it to say it's not in force for the voting that concludes on Tuesday.

Commonwealth Court, in a 3-2 decision, said 69 mail ballots that lacked dates or had inaccurate dates should be counted in two Philadelphia state House of Representatives special elections held in September.

The judges emphasized they were ruling on an election that has already occurred — and involved unopposed candidates — but there's uncertainty about how it might apply to the election underway. Pennsylvania is the largest swing state in the close presidential race, and its voters are also filling a U.S. Senate seat, three statewide row offices and most of the legislature.

The rules for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been frequently litigated in state and federal courts since absentee and mail-in ballots were allowed for all registered voters by the Legislature in 2019, on the eve of the pandemic. In March, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement of an accurate, handwritten date was enforceable, and in April the state redesigned the envelopes to make it harder for voters to make dating mistakes. The state Supreme Court last month turned down an effort to throw out the dating requirement, and said on Oct. 5 it would not revisit the issue.

The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania argued the decision came down too close to Election Day, county boards of elections should have been allowed to weigh in, and the state Supreme Court has recently ruled the other way about the same topic.

“Without this court's intervention, county boards will thus likely count undated ballots the General Assembly has said must not be counted,” they wrote in the filing made Thursday. They warned that the uniform date requirement may be applied in different ways across the state.

“There is no excuse — none — for the majority rushing to invalidate the General Assembly's date requirement less than a week before the 2024 General Election,” they wrote in the emergency application for extraordinary relief.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave other parties until early Friday to respond.

In two decisions over the past two months, the state Supreme Court left the exterior envelope date mandate in place and indicated the high court did not want existing laws or procedures changed in substantial ways “during the pendency of an ongoing election.”

The Commonwealth Court majority said the requirement for accurate exterior envelope dates, which are not needed to determine if a ballot has arrived in time, runs afoul of the state constitutional provision that elections must be free and equal and no civil or military power can interfere with the “free exercise of the right of suffrage.”

FILE - Allegheny County Election Division Deputy Manager Chet Harhut carries a container of mail-in ballots from a secure area at the elections warehouse in Pittsburgh, April 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)