Civil lawsuits after a crime let you sue the person who harmed you, and often a negligent third party like a landlord or business, for money damages. You keep control of the case, the burden of proof is lower than in a criminal prosecution, and you can win even if the district attorney never files charges or the defendant is acquitted at trial.
What a Civil Case Gets You That a Criminal Case Doesn’t
A criminal case belongs to the government. A prosecutor decides whether to charge, what to charge, whether to offer a plea, and whether to take the case to trial. If there is a conviction, the punishment is jail, prison, probation, fines paid to the state, or in some jurisdictions death. The victim is a witness, not a party.
A civil case belongs to you. You are the plaintiff, you hire the lawyer, and you decide whether to settle or push forward. The burden of proof drops from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “preponderance of the evidence,” often described as “more likely than not,” or roughly a 51% threshold. The remedy is money, and sometimes a court order requiring the defendant to change behavior or stop doing something.
That gap in burden is why civil liability can attach where a criminal conviction cannot. On October 3, 1995, a criminal jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. On February 4, 1997, a unanimous civil jury found him liable for those same deaths and returned a $33.5 million verdict: $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the Goldman family and $12.5 million in punitive damages to each family. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in full in January 2001.
Some other structural differences matter. Criminal defendants have a constitutional right to a public defender; civil plaintiffs and defendants don’t. Criminal juries generally must be unanimous; many states permit civil verdicts with less than full agreement. And the constitutional protections against illegal searches and self-incrimination that shape criminal cases don’t apply the same way on the civil side.
What You Can Recover
Criminal restitution, when a judge orders it, is generally limited to documented out-of-pocket losses. A civil suit reaches further.
- Economic damages. Past and future medical and therapy expenses, lost income, lost earning capacity, and other measurable financial losses.
- Non-economic damages. Pain and suffering, emotional distress, PTSD, loss of enjoyment of life, humiliation, and damage to relationships.
- Punitive damages. Financial penalties designed to punish conduct that was malicious, reckless, or in bad faith. These may require a higher evidentiary standard, often “clear and convincing” proof rather than the usual preponderance.
- Injunctive relief. Court orders requiring changes to policies, training, or operations, or ordering a defendant to stop specific conduct.
Many attorneys who represent crime victims work on a contingency basis, meaning the client pays nothing unless there is a recovery. In some kinds of cases, statutes shift fees to the losing defendant.
Suing the Person Who Hurt You
Most civil cases brought by crime victims fall into a handful of tort categories. Assault means intentionally causing fear of harmful contact; battery is the harmful or offensive contact itself. Both are the civil counterparts to the criminal charges of the same name, and neither depends on a criminal prosecution succeeding first.
Wrongful death claims are brought by surviving family members when someone is killed without legal justification. Homicides, police shootings, and killings that grew out of unsafe premises are all common fact patterns. Intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress covers severe psychological harm caused by extreme conduct.
A handful of states have written specific statutory paths for crime victims into their codes, giving survivors a civil claim tied directly to the criminal act rather than requiring them to force the facts into a traditional common-law tort. Whether your state has one is a question for a local attorney.
Suing a Landlord, Business, or Other Third Party
Some of the most productive civil cases don’t target the criminal at all. They go after the property owner who ignored broken locks, the business that skipped security guards, or the institution that failed to screen a dangerous employee. Third-party defendants are often insured, and insurance policies usually cover negligence even though they exclude intentional crimes, which is why suing the negligent party can produce a real recovery where suing the offender would not.
To win a negligent security or premises liability claim, you generally have to show four things: the defendant owed you a duty to keep the premises reasonably safe, the defendant breached that duty through inadequate security, the breach caused your injuries, and you suffered damages. Foreseeability drives most of these cases. Courts typically want to see evidence of prior similar incidents on or around the property, showing the defendant should have anticipated the risk and taken steps to address it.
The Parkland school shooting litigation shows the scope these cases can reach. The federal government settled 40 civil cases for $127.5 million in March 2022 without admitting fault. The Broward County school district separately settled with 52 families for $25 million. Families also pursued suits against the Broward Sheriff’s Office and individual security personnel who allegedly failed to confront the shooter.
A more recent example is the $35 million wrongful death lawsuit filed in February 2026 against Youth Villages, a nonprofit that operates the Memphis Allies gun violence intervention program. The family of Matthew Williams, 22, alleges the organization failed to provide adequate security at its Hickory Hill facility, where Williams was shot and killed during a program meeting on April 9, 2025. The 117-page complaint points to red flags the family says the organization ignored, including a prior altercation among participants and the shooting death of another program member two days earlier. Youth Villages has said armed security and metal detectors were in place at the time.
One boundary to watch: when the negligent third party is a government entity, state sovereign immunity laws can sharply cap what a victim can collect. Florida’s Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the Parkland shooting was a single “incident or occurrence” for sovereign immunity purposes, capping aggregate government liability at $300,000 for the entire event. Victims in Florida can petition the legislature for “claim bills” to recover beyond the cap, but that route is political and separate from the courts. Your state’s rules will have their own contours.
Suing the Police or a Government Actor
When the harm comes from a police officer or another government actor, the vehicle is 42 U.S.C. § 1983, originally part of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The statute lets you sue state and local officials who violate your constitutional rights while acting “under color of law.” Excessive force, false arrest, wrongful death, and malicious prosecution are the common claims.
Qualified immunity is the biggest obstacle. The doctrine shields individual officers from personal liability unless they violated a “clearly established” right that a reasonable officer would have known about. The Supreme Court has described the protection as covering “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Critics say the standard blocks accountability for all but the most extreme misconduct.
Suing the city or county that employs the officer is possible but hard. Under Monell v. Department of Social Services (1978), a municipality can be held liable only if the constitutional violation resulted from an official policy or custom, not simply because it employed the wrongdoer. Proving municipal liability usually requires showing “deliberate indifference,” meaning the department knew its practices were creating constitutional risks and did nothing.
Even with those hurdles, verdicts and settlements can be large. In November 2024, a federal jury in Dallas awarded $98.65 million to the family of Botham Jean, who was shot and killed in his own apartment by off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger in September 2018. Guyger had already been convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years. The family of George Floyd received a $27 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis in March 2021. The family of Sonya Massey reached a $10 million settlement in her police shooting death, with final approval granted in February 2025.
Reform proposals continue to move in Congress. As of mid-2026, three qualified immunity bills are pending in the 119th Congress: the Qualified Immunity Act of 2025 (S.122), the Qualified Immunity Abolition Act of 2026 (H.R. 7046), and the Ending Qualified Immunity Act (H.R. 3602). None have been enacted.
How Long You Have to File
Every civil claim has a statute of limitations, a hard deadline that starts a clock running from the event. Miss it and the case is gone regardless of how strong the facts are. For assault and battery, the window can be as short as one year from the incident in states like New York. Wrongful death claims typically must be filed within two years of the death. Section 1983 claims borrow the personal-injury deadline of the state where the incident happened, which varies widely.
Child sexual abuse is the one area where the deadlines have moved dramatically. As of mid-2025, 30 states and three U.S. territories have enacted civil revival laws, sometimes called “lookback windows,” that temporarily or permanently reopen the filing period for claims that would otherwise be time-barred. Nineteen states plus the District of Columbia have eliminated the civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse entirely.
Reforms are still landing. Maryland now allows child sexual abuse claims to be filed at any time. Oregon eliminated its civil statute of limitations for sexual abuse and sexual assault for incidents occurring on or after June 26, 2025. Texas extended its deadline to 20 years after the victim’s 18th birthday. At the federal level, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced S.3815 (“Virginia’s Law”) in February 2026, which would eliminate statutes of limitations for federal civil lawsuits involving sex trafficking and sexual abuse.
If you think you might have a claim, talk to a lawyer sooner rather than later. The specific deadline for your situation depends on the claim, the state, and sometimes your age at the time of the harm.
Winning Is Not the Same as Collecting
A civil judgment is a piece of paper that says the defendant owes you money. Turning that paper into cash is a separate problem, and sometimes an insurmountable one. The Simpson case is the textbook example. Simpson moved to Florida, where an unlimited homestead exemption shielded his primary residence from creditors. His NFL and Screen Actors Guild pensions, worth millions, were protected under federal retirement law. By the time of his death in April 2024, the Goldman family had collected less than 1% of what they were owed, under $133,000 in direct payments plus roughly $500,000 from auctioned assets including his Heisman Trophy, which sold in 1999 for $255,000. With interest, the unpaid judgment had grown to an estimated $100 million or more.
Third-party defendants with insurance are a different story, which is another reason those cases matter. So is a defendant with significant non-exempt assets or income.
Federal criminal restitution has a parallel collection problem. Under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act (18 U.S.C. § 3663A), federal judges must order offenders to pay the full amount of a victim’s losses regardless of ability to pay. Federal prosecutors collect roughly $1 billion each year for crime victims, but that is less than $1 out of every $10 owed. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that only $10 billion of the $110 billion in outstanding restitution debt was expected to be recovered, largely because offenders lack the resources. The Crime Victims’ Rights Act (18 U.S.C. § 3771) guarantees victims the right to “full and timely restitution as provided in law” and lets them enforce that right in court, but the Act does not create a cause of action against the government itself if the system fails to collect.
The Victims of Crime Act, signed in 1984, created a separate safety net. The Crime Victims Fund is financed not by tax dollars but by criminal fines, penalties, and forfeitures from federal convictions. Victims can apply to their state for reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses including medical care, mental health counseling, funeral costs, and lost wages. A 2021 amendment directing proceeds from deferred prosecution agreements into the fund has contributed over $1.45 billion as of August 2024. That money is capped, application-based, and separate from anything a civil suit might produce, but for many victims it is the fastest path to real dollars.