SAN JOSE, Calif. — A community activist who was infamously shot in the groin with a foam round by a San Jose police officer during the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations is settling a federal civil rights lawsuit he filed against the city, nearly five years to the day after he was severely injured.

Derrick Sanderlin is the headlining plaintiff in a lawsuit filed that same year seeking damages from the city for their injuries suffered at the hands of police on May 29, 2020, a controversy that inflicted a black eye on the San Jose Police Department for its heavy use of less-lethal munitions and tear gas and led to reforms in its crowd-control tactics.

The settlement announcement was revealed Tuesday in a federal docket for the Northern District of California, three days ahead of the scheduled trial start Friday. The terms of the settlement were not listed in the docket, which stated that a “stipulation and proposed order (is) anticipated.”

Also settling their claims against the city is Vera Clanton, an attorney who was serving as a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild and claimed her Fourth Amendment rights were violated when she was arrested and manhandled by police officers, and Sanderlin’s wife Cayla, who claimed her husband’s injury harmed their relationship and threatened their ability to have a child.

Plaintiff attorney Sarah Marinho declined to comment on the pending settlement, on account of the case still being in active litigation with plaintiffs who have not settled. The City Attorney’s Office, which is representing the city and several police officers in the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

The four remaining plaintiffs contend that they were acting peacefully at the demonstrations when they were hit by police projectiles, roughed up by police officers, or both. The city’s position in legal filings is that these plaintiffs cannot prove that their injuries were caused by police.

“Discussions continue” on those claims, according to the federal docket. Another plaintiff was dropped from the lawsuit after reaching a settlement, though the terms were not readily available.

The litigation was approved for trial by a district judge in March 2023 but was held up until last September while the city mounted a challenge with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The higher court upheld the crux of the lawsuit, though it dropped a key commander from the case after finding he was entitled to qualified immunity, a legal protection that shields government workers from litigation for their work actions absent a clear constitutional violation.

Sanderlin, an activist who once provided bias training for San Jose police, claims in the lawsuit that he was trying to deescalate tension when he stood in front between demonstrators — protesting the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis a few days earlier — and a police line near City Hall. As he held up his hands and held a sign, Officer Michael Panighetti shot him in the groin with a foam round.

According to the city’s filings ahead of trial, officers saw Sanderlin as blocking officers’ “attempts to target the suspects throwing things, thereby shielding the suspects and increasing the danger to officers.” Panighetti claimed he clearly ordered Sanderlin to move and “warned Sanderlin he would be hit with a projectile if he did not move.” The officer further claimed that “he aimed at Sanderlin’s midsection … but the projectile unintentionally struck Sanderlin in the groin.”

In contrast, the most recent plaintiff filing contends that Sanderlin “implored police not to continue shooting protesters. Derrick was not posing a threat or invading the personal space of officers, however Officer Panighetti took aim at him and shot him in the groin, rupturing his testicle.” The filing cites media and other video footage showing “Derrick holding a carton of milk in one hand and his cardboard sign that read ‘We R Worthy of Life’ in the other, with both hands in the air at the time he was shot.”

Clanton stated in the same plaintiff filing that she was trying to record the arrest of a young man “from a safe distance” on May 31, 2020, when a police sergeant ordered her to leave, and then ordered officers to arrest her. The officers “slammed her to the ground, injuring her knees,” and Clanton alleges that officers were retaliating against her for recording the police in public.

The city claims that Clanton was violating a briefly enforced curfew instituted by the city after the first few days of protests, and that her resistance caused her and the arresting officers to fall to the ground.

The case pending settlement is part of an array of litigation stemming from the 2020 protests. The most recent was in January, when a federal civil jury awarded a man $1.3 million for his injuries from being hit in the leg with a police projectile.

In 2023, the city paid $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit from several people injured during the protests, including a bystander who lost his eye from a police round. Also that year, the city paid $75,000 to a man who was hit in the abdomen by a police projectile a few hours after he was recorded on video helping carry to safety an officer who had been punched in the face while manning a skirmish line.

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