Little Rock will not be sanctioned further for late payment of a $10,000 fine, a penalty imposed because the city attorney's office was not prepared for trial in a former police officer's civil-rights lawsuit against the Police Department.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox ruled Friday that City Attorney Tom Carpenter had technically complied with his order to undergo five hours of case management and one hour of ethics training, though Fox said the attorney had failed to respect the spirit of Fox's order.
Also Friday, Fox sanctioned plaintiff Tiffany Malone because her attorneys, Luther Sutter and Lucien Gillham, did not show up for the hearing, which they had requested. Sutter could not be reached by phone Friday evening.
Instead of the jury trial next month that Malone's attorneys had requested, Fox said he will decide the case. If the plaintiff wants to present her evidence to a jury, she'll have to drop the lawsuit and refile it, the judge said.
Fox said he is also considering limiting what witnesses Malone can call at trial, a penalty requested by city attorneys.
Regarding Carpenter's compliance with the legal-training order, Fox said he had intended that the city attorney's office benefit from the training, but said he would accept that Carpenter had completed it. Carpenter did not attend Friday's hearing.
"I'm going through here and doing my best to find five hours and one hour so I don't have to hold the city of Little Rock in contempt," he told city lawyers after reviewing a sworn statement Carpenter submitted Thursday afternoon.
Fox said he would have sanctioned the city for contempt by striking its response to the lawsuit, forcing it to accept a judgment in favor of the plaintiff.
In his statement Carpenter asserted that he'd complied with Fox's order through his work as a law-school adjunct professor and as a presenter at legal conferences, citing instructional lectures he'd delivered at the International Municipal Lawyers Association in San Diego in October and at a May drunken-driving conference for Arkansas prosecutors, according to his statement.
To prepare for those lectures, he had to study the issues that the judge had ordered him to review, Carpenter stated in his pleading.
Fox called the affidavit "facially incorrect" because it states that Carpenter had completed 39.5 hours of continuing legal education -- almost eight times what the judge had ordered -- and seven hours of ethics, seven times what Fox required.
The filing shows that Carpenter, who is required as an attorney to undergo regular annual legal training, received credit for 46.5 training hours, but did not actually undergo that much training.
In April, Fox fined the city $10,000 because its lawyers had repeatedly violated his scheduling order and were not prepared to go to trial, forcing him to reset the proceedings from May to February.
The lawyer representing the city had missed deadlines to exchange evidence with the plaintiff and had not deposed any of the witnesses who would be testifying, the judge found.
The lawyer had never handled any litigation involving the legal issues presented by the lawsuit and did not know what witnesses she would call at trial, Fox wrote in his order.
Fox compared the lawyer's lack of preparation to legal malpractice, stating that the city lawyers had wasted taxpayer money by not being ready to go to trial. The lawyer resigned the day Fox issued the $10,000 sanction.
When the fine was not paid on time, Fox ruled that it had not been submitted because of Carpenter's advice. He ruled that the city could avoid further sanctions for contempt of court if Carpenter completed the course of legal training in caseload management and ethics.
Little Rock is appealing the fine to the Arkansas Supreme Court, with its final pleadings due by Monday.
Metro on 01/14/2017