Cariol Holloman-Horne's legal team made the first step Wednesday toward a new lawsuit over her firing 12 years ago from the Buffalo Police Department.
Her attorneys filed in State Supreme Court in Buffalo paperwork seeking an index number assigned to her old case. It is a procedural motion, but it signals the start of a new legal fight to have her firing overturned and to get a full police pension.
Horne was fired in 2008 following an arbitration hearing. She was accused of attacking a fellow officer as he was trying to arrest a man during a domestic dispute on Nov. 1, 2006. Horne said then and has maintained over the years that she was trying to stop the officer from choking the man.
At the time, she had 19 years on the job, which meant she was one year shy of the 20 years required to receive a full police pension upon retirement. That meant she would have to wait until she was 55 to retire and receive a partial pension from the state.
People are also reading…
This is not Horne's first attempt to have her case overturned. Several months after she was fired, she sued to be reinstated, but then-State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Makowski ruled against her on several procedural matters.
Horne's case took on renewed interest after the officer she had fought, Greg Kwiatkowski, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in an unrelated federal police brutality case. Kwiatkowski, who testified against two other officers who were acquitted in that case, was sentenced to four months in prison.
The uproar earlier this year over the video-recorded death of George Floyd, who suffocated under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer while three others officers stood nearby, also drew new attention to Horne's firing.
Horne is represented by a legal team led by Ronald Sullivan and Intisar Rabb of Harvard Law School. Sullivan and his team represented the family of Michael Brown, a Black teenager whose shooting death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., sparked protests there in 2014. The attorneys were not available for comment Wednesday.
Separate from her lawsuit, Horne on Tuesday celebrated the Buffalo Common Council's passage of "Cariol's Law," which would legally require an officer to intercede when another officer is using excessive force.
The legislation also includes a provision that would allow an officer terminated in retaliation for reporting the unreasonable use of force by another officer within the last 20 years to have their case reviewed by a court. That could potentially open another legal avenue for Horne to pursue.
The Council voted 8-to-1 in favor of the local ordinance. The next step is for Mayor Byron W. Brown to sign the legislation into law or veto it.
Horne's case is anything but simple.
Horne unsuccessfully tried to sue the city in federal court over her firing. David Neal Mack lost a civil case against the other police officers involved in his arrest.
Two state comptrollers have reviewed her bid to have her pension restored, but both said she hadn't worked long enough to qualify.
Also, the Buffalo Police Department fired her once before in 2000 after she was written up for being AWOL on multiple occasions. Five years later, following an arbitration hearing, she was reinstated to her job.
Mayor Byron Brown asked former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to review her case and when that didn't yield anything new, Brown offered Horne a job at City Hall, which she turned down.
Maki Becker
