Antonio Ponvert III focuses on catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death, civil rights and constitutional law, police misconduct, product liability, premises liability, and other complex cases in Federal and State courts in Connecticut and across the nation. He has represented plaintiffs in hundreds of high profile lawsuits, and has argued more than 40 appeals in State and Federal courts of appeals.
Since joining Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder in 1999, Antonio has achieved record-breaking verdicts and settlements for his clients, including the second largest verdict in Connecticut history ($41.75 Million) on behalf of a young woman who contracted Tick-Borne Encephalitis on an overseas school trip; the one and only wrongful death settlement ever with the manufacturer of skoal smokeless tobacco ($5 Million) on behalf of the surviving wife and children of a man who died from tongue cancer; and a $2.5 Million settlement and substantial injunctive relief on behalf of female correctional officers who were victims of sexual harassment and discrimination at the Connecticut Department of Correction.
Other notable verdicts and settlements include a $2 Million verdict for a female victim of covert video surveillance in her home; a$1.6 Million settlement for the family of a man shot to death by a New Milford police detective; a $1.2 Million verdict for a man who suffered hearing loss and tinnitus from the explosion of a defective tire; and a $900,000 settlement with a national property management company on behalf of a young woman who was sexually assaulted as a result of negligent security.
Antonio has won numerous awards for prisoners and psychiatric patients, including the largest amount ever paid in Connecticut ($3.2 Million) for the death of a prisoner in state custody; a $1 Million settlement for the asphyxiation death of a prisoner who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia; a $1 Million settlement for the suicide of a mentally ill patient at a state psychiatric hospital; and a $700,000 settlement for a victim of a sexual assault on an in-patient psychiatric unit at a Connecticut hospital. In addition, he was the first to compel the State of California to provide organ transplants to prisoners.
For more than a decade, Antonio represented the Guardians Black Police Officers Association against the City of Bridgeport in one of the longest-running race discrimination cases in the nation.
In 2005, Ponvert represented the father of Michael Ross, a young man on Connecticut death row who had volunteered to be executed by lethal injection and whose mental competency was in doubt. In two separate cases, spanning a period of five months, Antonio sued the State to prevent the execution, he obtained a temporary injunction from the federal district court, and he then brought and defended appeals in the Federal Circuit Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Michael eventually was executed, despite his father's efforts to save him.
Among Antonio's current cases, he represents the surviving family of a man shot in the back and killed by a Bridgeport police officer, a mentally disabled young man who was sexually assaulted by a teacher at a residential facility, and a boy whose legs were nearly severed by the negligent operation of a forklift.
Attorney Ponvert is on staff at Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College in Dubois, Wyoming. He has lectured and written on trial practice, constitutional law, civil rights, and class actions.
