State lawyers have agreed to pay $256,875 in legal fees to a Benton County attorney whose client, a nurse, prevailed in a wrongful termination lawsuit over her dismissal from the State Hospital.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox of Little Rock signed off on the settlement Monday after the sides reported they had reached an agreement to pay attorney Luther Sutter the fees, plus interest, to end an appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court on the question of how much Sutter was owed. Fox had awarded $272,875 to Sutter last July.
Sutter appealed because the judge did not award him his expenses for bringing the litigation. The state appealed because attorneys argued that the award was too high.
Sutter had asked for $333,443 in fees and costs for the work that he, his partner Lucien Gillham, and staff attorney Tona Demers had done over the five years it took to bring the case to trial. That amount represented 979 hours and 20 minutes of work, at $300 to $350 per hour.
The judge found grounds for 819 hours of work before the March 2015 trial.
Lawyers for the Arkansas attorney general's office, which represented the Department of Human Services as defendant, did not dispute that Sutter was entitled to some compensation based on the jury verdict but described the amount he wanted as exorbitant.
A Pulaski County jury in 2015 took 36 minutes to unanimously rule in favor of nurse Gloria Daniel's whistleblower claim against the agency that she had been wrongly fired for criticizing how the hospital handled the food-allergy death of a mentally ill teenager.
Jurors awarded her the $40,000 in lost wages she had sought, plus interest, in a verdict that included an award of "reasonable" legal fees to Sutter. The state did not appeal the verdict and has made the money available to her, but records don't show whether she's collected yet.
Agency officials said that Daniel, a nurse since 1982, was fired in September 2010 by then-chief administrator Charles Smith for improperly locking a female patient in her room.
But Sutter argued at trial that Daniel was actually fired for either criticizing how poorly prepared the hospital was when Gary Cortez Reatherford died in September 2009 or for her participation in the resulting probe of the 19-year-old Benton man's death from an allergic reaction to shrimp.
Daniel sued in January 2011. The first trial ended in a mistrial over evidentiary issues in 2012.
Reatherford, who had bipolar disorder, died of acute anaphylaxis about 2½ hours after mistakenly being served shrimp by the food service company that provided hospital meals.
The company had substituted shrimp after running out of the popcorn chicken it had been serving. Georgia-based Morrison Healthcare Food Services reached an undisclosed settlement with Reatherford's family in late 2010.
The Department of Human Services was never sued in the death.
Metro on 06/08/2016