When Kenneth Ellis III’s family walked into an Albuquerque courtroom in March 2013, they weren’t just fighting for money. They were fighting to be believed. Ellis, an Iraq War veteran with PTSD, had been shot and killed by an Albuquerque Police Department detective during a mental health crisis outside a convenience store. The jury didn’t just side with the family. It awarded them over $10 million and found the city negligent in how it trained and supervised the officer who fired the fatal shot.
The attorney who stood in front of that jury and told them the officers “have told you many lies” was Shannon L. Kennedy.
If you’re searching her name, you’re likely in one of two situations. Either you or someone you love has been hurt by police misconduct, a school district, or another public institution, and you’re trying to understand who can actually help. Or you’re a legal professional trying to understand how a small Albuquerque firm has repeatedly taken on the government and won.
This article walks through both: who Shannon L. Kennedy is, what her track record actually shows, and what it means for anyone considering a civil rights claim in New Mexico.
Who Is Shannon L. Kennedy?
Shannon L. Kennedy is a founding partner of the Kennedy Law Firm (now practicing as Kennedy Kennedy & Ives) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more than two decades, she has focused almost entirely on civil rights litigation, representing people harmed by police officers, school districts, and other government institutions.
She didn’t start out planning to spend her career suing police departments and school boards. She started as a criminal defense attorney. At some point early in that career, she asked herself a question that a lot of young lawyers ask but few actually act on: who do I want to represent? People who can already afford the best lawyer in town, or the people whose stories usually go unheard?
She chose the second group. That choice has defined her practice ever since.
Early Career and Education
Kennedy’s academic path is unusual for a trial lawyer, and it shows up in how she builds her cases.
She began her legal studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, where she worked in the school’s public interest law clinic representing battered immigrant women. During this period, she also worked with the United Nations Human Rights Project, representing female torture survivors seeking political asylum.
She later transferred into the University of New Mexico School of Law’s dual-degree program, where she was a Law Review contributor and a member of the International Moot Court Team. She graduated with both a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies. Before law school, she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon.
That combination (human rights work, immigrant advocacy, and formal legal training in civil rights) is unusual. Most personal injury or civil litigation attorneys don’t come up through international human rights clinics. Kennedy did, and it shapes how she frames cases: not just as claims for damages, but as instances of institutions failing the people they’re supposed to protect.
What Does a Civil Rights Attorney Actually Do?
Before going further into Kennedy’s case history, it helps to define the term, since it gets used loosely.
A civil rights attorney represents people whose constitutional or statutory rights were violated, usually by a government actor. That’s the key distinction from most personal injury law: the defendant isn’t a careless driver or a company that made a faulty product. It’s a police department, a school district, a jail, or another arm of the government.
These cases typically fall under federal law, most often 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which allows individuals to sue state and local government employees for violating their constitutional rights while acting “under color of law.” Common claims include:
- Excessive force by police officers
- Wrongful death caused by law enforcement
- Sexual abuse or misconduct by school employees or officers
- Failure to train or supervise by a government agency
- Retaliation against whistleblowers within public institutions
These cases are hard to win. Government defendants often invoke qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that can shield officials from liability unless their conduct violated a “clearly established” right. It’s one of the biggest hurdles in civil rights litigation, and it’s a large part of why so few attorneys build an entire practice around this work.
Kennedy has built her entire practice around exactly this work.
The Landmark Cases That Define Shannon L. Kennedy’s Record
The Kenneth Ellis III Case: A Wrongful Death Verdict That Made Headlines
The case that brought Kennedy the most public attention began in 2010, when APD Detective Brett Lampiris-Tremba shot and killed Kenneth Ellis III, a 25-year-old Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD, during a standoff outside a convenience store in Albuquerque. Ellis was holding a gun to his own head. He was not pointing it at officers.
Kennedy, along with co-counsel Joseph Kennedy and Frances Carpenter, filed a wrongful death and loss of consortium lawsuit on behalf of Ellis’s young son. Before trial, the city offered a $1.3 million settlement. Kennedy’s team turned it down.
That decision paid off. In March 2013, after several hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of $10.3 million, including $7.6 million against the city for wrongful death and $2.7 million in punitive damages against Detective Lampiris-Tremba personally. The jury found the city had been negligent in supervising and retaining the officer, and found a second officer had used excessive force in pinning Ellis’s car during the encounter.
Outside the courtroom, Ellis’s sister told reporters it was never really about the money. It was about being heard.
What makes this case matter beyond the dollar figure is what came after it. The verdict, and the public attention it generated, is widely credited as one of the events that helped push the U.S. Department of Justice to open a formal investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department’s use of force. That DOJ investigation later resulted in a federal consent decree requiring sweeping reforms to APD’s policies on deadly force, de-escalation, and officer training, reforms New Mexico communities are still living under today.
Sanchez v. Brokop: Protecting a Child Survivor
Not every case Kennedy has tried involves a police shooting. Some of her most significant work involves protecting children from abuse by the adults meant to educate and supervise them.
In Sanchez v. Brokop (04-cv-134), Kennedy represented a young girl who had been sexually assaulted by a teacher. The case resulted in a $3.2 million settlement, and, notably, it also led the school district to implement mandatory training for principals on how to identify sexual predators within school staff.
Kennedy has described receiving a handwritten note from that client during the trial. It read simply: “Thank you for fighting for me.” It’s the kind of detail that explains, better than any verdict amount can, why she does this work.
The Albuquerque Schools Class Action: Reducing Unnecessary Arrests
Kennedy also brought a class action lawsuit against the City of Albuquerque over how student misconduct was being handled inside public schools. Before the case, minor behavioral issues were routinely being treated as criminal matters. Students were being arrested and removed from campus, sometimes without their parents even being notified.
The resulting policy changes required School Resource Officers, many of them retired police officers placed inside schools, to receive specific training on how to interact appropriately with young people. The result was dramatic: on-campus arrests dropped from 180 incidents over a two-year period to just one the following year, after the new training policy took effect.
That’s the kind of outcome that doesn’t always make headlines the way an eight-figure verdict does, but it arguably changed more lives. Every one of those 179 fewer arrests represents a kid who didn’t end up with a juvenile record for something that used to be handled by a teacher, not a police officer.
Why Kennedy’s Case Selection Pattern Matters
Look across Kennedy’s case history and a pattern becomes clear. She isn’t just taking any case that walks through the door. She gravitates toward cases involving:
- Children and youth, especially victims of school-based sexual abuse
- Veterans and individuals in mental health crisis, particularly in encounters with police
- Systemic failures, not just individual bad actors
That pattern matters if you’re trying to figure out whether an attorney is right for your situation. A lawyer who has spent two decades specifically litigating against police departments and school districts understands the procedural traps in these cases (qualified immunity, government notice requirements, and short statutes of limitations for claims against public entities) in a way that a general personal injury attorney typically does not.
How Civil Rights Litigation Creates Policy Change
One theme that runs through Kennedy’s career, and through her firm’s broader philosophy, is that a settlement or verdict isn’t the end goal by itself. The goal is also systemic change that prevents the next person from being harmed the same way.
This shows up repeatedly:
- The Ellis verdict is connected to the DOJ’s investigation of APD and the reforms that followed.
- The Sanchez v. Brokop settlement led to mandatory predator-identification training for school principals.
- The schools class action led to statewide-relevant training requirements for School Resource Officers and a steep drop in unnecessary student arrests.
Kenneth Ellis’s own sister, working alongside the VA hospital where he’d been treated, lobbied for legislative changes that resulted in mandatory crisis intervention and de-escalation training for police officers across New Mexico. Litigation was the mechanism, but policy reform was the outcome.
This is worth understanding if you’re deciding whether to pursue a civil rights claim. These cases are rarely fast, and they’re rarely easy. But when they succeed, they can do something a typical injury settlement can’t: change how an institution operates going forward.
What to Expect When Hiring a Civil Rights Attorney Like Shannon L. Kennedy
If you’re considering reaching out to a firm like Kennedy’s, here’s a realistic look at what the process generally involves.
Free, Confidential Consultation
Most civil rights firms, including Kennedy’s, offer an initial consultation at no cost. This is where you describe what happened, and the attorney evaluates whether there’s a viable legal claim.
Statute of Limitations Review
This step is critical, and often misunderstood. New Mexico’s statute of limitations for civil rights claims varies depending on the type of claim and whether the defendant is a government entity. Some claims involving child sexual abuse have extended or reopened limitations windows under New Mexico law. This is exactly why case evaluation should happen sooner rather than later, and why “how long ago it happened” shouldn’t stop you from asking.
Investigation and Evidence Gathering
Civil rights cases against government entities often require obtaining body camera footage, internal affairs records, personnel files, and training records. Government agencies don’t always hand these over willingly, which is part of why experienced counsel matters here.
Filing and Navigating Government Defenses
Once a case is filed, expect the defense to raise qualified immunity and other government-specific defenses early. This is often where cases against inexperienced counsel fall apart. It’s also where a firm with a track record of getting past these defenses, the way Kennedy’s firm has done repeatedly, becomes valuable.
Trial or Settlement, With an Eye Toward Reform
As Kennedy’s case history shows, resolution doesn’t always mean just a check. In several of her cases, settlements or verdicts were paired with binding policy changes, training requirements, or oversight commitments from the institution involved.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid After Police Misconduct or Institutional Abuse
- Waiting too long to consult an attorney. New Mexico’s deadlines for claims against government entities can be shorter than in typical personal injury cases, and missing them can end a case before it starts.
- Talking to investigators or insurers without legal guidance. What you say early on, even innocently, can be used against you later.
- Assuming there’s no case because “it’s the police” or “it’s the school.” Government defendants are harder to sue, not impossible to sue. That’s a very different thing.
- Not preserving evidence. Photos, medical records, and even your own written timeline of events can matter enormously later.
- Choosing a generalist attorney for a specialized fight. Civil rights litigation against government institutions has its own procedural rules. Experience specifically in this area isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s often the difference between a case that survives and one that gets dismissed early.
Final Thoughts
Shannon L. Kennedy’s career reflects a specific and consistent choice: representing people, often children, veterans, and others in vulnerable positions, against institutions with far more power and resources than they have. Her record includes an eight-figure wrongful death verdict connected to a federal investigation into police practices, a settlement that changed how school districts train administrators to spot abuse, and a class action that measurably reduced unnecessary arrests of students.
If you or someone you love has experienced police misconduct, institutional abuse, or a wrongful death involving a government agency in New Mexico, the deadlines and legal hurdles involved make early guidance important. Consider consulting a civil rights attorney with direct experience in these specific types of cases to understand your options.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Shannon L. Kennedy?
Shannon L. Kennedy is a civil rights attorney and founding partner of the Kennedy Law Firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has spent over two decades representing victims of police misconduct, sexual abuse by institutions, and other civil rights violations, including the family in the widely covered $10.3 million Kenneth Ellis III wrongful death verdict against the City of Albuquerque.
What is Shannon L. Kennedy’s biggest case?
Her most publicly recognized case is the 2013 wrongful death verdict on behalf of the family of Kenneth Ellis III, an Iraq War veteran fatally shot by an APD detective. The jury awarded over $10 million, and the case is widely linked to the DOJ’s subsequent investigation into APD’s use of force.
Does Shannon L. Kennedy only handle police misconduct cases?
No. Her practice also includes sexual abuse cases involving schools and institutions, wrongful death claims, and civil rights class actions, such as the case that reformed how student misconduct was handled in Albuquerque public schools.
How much does it cost to hire a civil rights attorney in New Mexico?
Most civil rights and personal injury firms, including firms like Kennedy’s, work on a contingency fee basis. This means you typically pay no upfront fees, and the attorney is paid a percentage only if your case results in a settlement or verdict. Ask any firm you’re considering to explain their fee structure clearly during your consultation.
What is qualified immunity, and how does it affect my case?
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that can protect government officials, including police officers, from being held personally liable for constitutional violations unless the conduct violated a right that was “clearly established” at the time. It’s one of the most significant legal hurdles in civil rights litigation, which is part of why experienced counsel in this specific area matters.
How long do I have to file a civil rights claim in New Mexico?
It depends on the type of claim and who the defendant is. Claims against government entities often have shorter notice requirements and filing deadlines than typical injury claims. Some abuse-related claims have separate, sometimes extended, deadlines under New Mexico law. Because these timelines vary and can be unforgiving, it’s worth getting a case evaluated as soon as possible rather than assuming you’ve missed your window.
Can I still file a claim if the misconduct happened years ago?
Possibly. It depends heavily on the type of claim and applicable New Mexico law, which has evolved on this issue, particularly for cases involving child sexual abuse. Don’t assume it’s too late without asking a qualified attorney to review the specific facts and dates involved.
