Not Just Trying to Make a Living

The first headline on Hank Sherrod’s eponymous firm website says what he does: “I Hold Law Enforcement and Jails Accountable.” The second says why he does it: “I Don’t Like Bullies.”

“People that I represent, for the most part, feel abused,” explains Sherrod. “They are arrested for something they didn’t do, or they get assaulted because they had the temerity to talk back to a police officer.”

These clients, Sherrod says, wind up in a deposition, where they see the police officer being filmed with a camera, and with a court reporter recording everything they say. “The bully has to sit there,” Sherrod says. “And I get to ask him questions.”

A 61-year-old father of two who runs his law firm with wife Robyn (“and two cats, two dogs and turtles,” he adds), Sherrod reminds his clients that cops are required to comply with the Constitution and they are prohibited by law from making false arrests and using excessive force. 

“Most of us take our civil rights for granted,” he says. “Almost all the folks that I represent, they’re law-abiding citizens. This was certainly the only time they’ve come to a lawyer about being a victim of police misconduct. They still trusted the police; they didn’t think they were at risk.

“But when the folks who are supposed to protect you will lie about you and hurt you, it really affects the way you see the world. So bringing the case is not first and foremost about getting compensation for their injuries. It is to be heard, and to hold the officer accountable.”

Most of us take our civil rights for granted. Almost all the folks that I represent, they’re law-abiding citizens.

One of Sherrod’s most prominent cases came in 2015, when he represented Sureshbhai Patel, an Indian national who was visiting the U.S. after the birth of his grandchild. “He was just taking a walk in Madison, Alabama, and a police officer stopped him and slammed him face-first into the ground,” Sherrod says. “He suffered a spinal cord injury. It’s almost impossible to fathom what the cop was thinking. Thankfully, we have the video, so we know that Mr. Patel didn’t do anything. He was barely over 100 pounds, a smallish Indian man. Usually, when officers do something violent to a person, you can understand at least at some level why they got pissed off and overreacted. But this literally is just a gentle man who didn’t resist in any way.”

The officer was charged with third-degree assault, as well as felony civil rights abuse by the FBI, but the two cases ended in hung juries. “Despite the video and being charged, he was never held criminally responsible—a true miscarriage of justice,” Sherrod says. Sherrod’s civil lawsuit against the city was settled in 2021 for $1.75 million.

“I’ve done other kinds of personal injury work,” Sherrod says. “But it’s a whole different thing when somebody has done something to you intentionally in violation of your rights.” 

Sherrod doesn’t have to think long about 

what inspired him to find this niche. His father, Floyd, was a legal services lawyer in northwest Alabama who won some memorable class action and gender discrimination lawsuits in the 1970s. 

“The seed was planted,” says his son, a 1989 graduate of Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville. “What he loved was helping poor people. I went off and was fortunate enough to do pretty well in school, and that gave me opportunities to clerk for a judge and work at a fancy law firm; but I always felt a call back to working for regular people instead of corporations.”

He started out representing employees and stumbled into cases about police abuse and jail neglect. “My dad just got me fired up to the kind of case where you’re not just trying to make a living,” Sherrod says. “You want something where, when you get up in the morning, there’s a bit of purpose to what you do.”