Oct 2
2025
Judge faults Buffalo cops in overturning jury verdict
- Share on
Excerpt from Dean Taylor’s Nov. 8, 2019, interview with Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division.
Two weeks ago state Supreme Court Judge John DelMonte did a rare thing.
He overturned a jury’s verdict clearing two Buffalo cops accused in a civil suit of assaulting a man who was using his phone to take video of a crime scene.
The case dates back to Sept. 1, 2019. Police were investigating a report of shots fired near the corner of Kehr and Fougeron streets on the city’s East Side. Dean Taylor, the plaintiff in the lawsuit, stood on the sidewalk across the street from the scene of the drive-by shooting, recording activity with his phone.
Taylor continued to do so for some time, DelMonte noted in his decision, before Officers Kyle Moriarty and Christopher Bridgett decided they wanted him to stop. Moriarty approached Taylor and told him to move, according to testimony. Taylor replied that he had a right to stand on a public sidewalk and record the scene.
Then the “lights went out,” Taylor said.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomTaylor said an officer punched him in the face “three or four times” and tackled him to the ground. He lost consciousness, then came to “with a whole bunch of people” on him. He was handcuffed, wrestled into the back of a patrol car and taken downtown, where he was strip-searched and jailed overnight. The next day he was charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of governmental administration, harassment and disorderly conduct. The charges were dismissed in city court a month later.
Taylor filed a complaint with the Buffalo Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division. In January 2020 then-Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood ruled Taylor’s allegation of excessive use of force “not sustained” — that is, there was not enough evidence to determine the officers’ guilt or innocence — but reprimanded the officers for “denying [Taylor his] first amendment rights.”
A month after that finding, Taylor sued the city, Lockwood, Moriarty, Bridgett and the other officers who piled on top of him. He accused them of assault, false arrest and imprisonment, and violating his constitutional rights.
Five years later — after a litany of motions, hearings, depositions and an appeal — the case went to trial before a jury, which on May 6 ruled in favor of the cops and the city. Taylor’s attorney, Blake Zaccagnino of the firm Shaw & Shaw, filed a post-trial motion asking DelMonte to set aside the jury’s decision, arguing that the jury’s verdict was contrary to the weight of the evidence.
In overturning the verdict, the judge wrote the cops “knew the plaintiff was entirely within his constitutional rights to videotape” police activity at the scene of the shooting. He said the city’s attorneys failed to provide evidence that Taylor’s presence harassed or discomfited anyone — except perhaps Moriarity and Bridgett, who “did express their own personal internal distaste for what the plaintiff was doing,” DelMonte wrote.
In their incident reports and testimony, the officers said a member of the family living in the house across the street told them they didn’t want Taylor taking video of their house, but the judge noted the officers never approached those family members — who were sitting on the porch of the house at the time — to ask if that was true.
“[T]here was no legally legitimate basis for any ‘reasonably prudent person’ to find or believe that probable cause existed to confront the plaintiff and place him under arrest,” DelMonte concluded.
Because they had no cause to arrest Taylor, all that followed — the punches, the takedown, the strip search, the night in jail — were unjustified, according to the judge.
DelMonte set aside the jury’s decision, found in favor of Taylor, and ordered a new trial solely for the purpose of determining how much the city should pay in damages.
The city’s lawyers last week filed a notice indicating their intention to appeal DelMonte’s decision. Zaccagnino, Taylor’s attorney, declined to comment on the case while that appeal is pending.
Moriarty and Bridgett previously have been involved in incidents that cost city taxpayers.
Bridgett in June 2018 hit a car downtown, near the intersection of Huron and Delaware, precipitating a lawsuit. Three years later the city paid the driver of the other vehicle $30,000 to settle the case.
In June 2024, Bridgett rear-ended a vehicle with his patrol car in South Buffalo, near the intersection of South Park Avenue and Altruria Street. That lawsuit is pending.
In May 2022, while off duty, Bridgett crashed his car through a fence and into a tree in a Town of Tonawanda cemetery, then abandoned the vehicle. When town police found him near the scene and questioned him, he at first denied then eventually admitted he was the driver of the badly damaged vehicle. He was given no sobriety tests or citations.
Moriarty was among the officers named in a lawsuit that ended with one of the most expensive settlements in the city’s history.
James Kistner on New Year’s Day 2017 saw two police cars parked in front of a rental property he owns on Scharmbeck Street, on the city’s East Side, across the street from his residence. When he approached the officers to ask what they were doing, one police car pulled away and struck Kistner, knocking him to the ground and injuring him.
Officers on the scene refused to let Kistner’s son call an ambulance for his father, took his phone and shoved him around. They arrested Kistner and sent him to ECMC for a psychological evaluation, then booked him, strip-searched him, and charged him with felony criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.
The charges were later dropped. The encounter was caught on surveillance video. Kistner in March 2018 filed a lawsuit in federal court that a magistrate judge called “extremely disturbing.”
The city in May agreed to settle Kistner’s lawsuit for $1.1 million. The check was issued to Kistner’s lawyers on Aug. 29, according to city records.
