Verner ends city lawsuit practice

Spokane Mayor Mary Verner has quietly ended a controversial legal practice at City Hall of routinely countersuing people who file civil rights claims against the city.

Verner’s directive to the city’s legal staff came earlier this year, Assistant City Attorney Pat Dalton said this week. At the time of the directive, Dalton was acting city attorney.

Howard Delaney, the city attorney since July 15, said Verner has asked him to review any potential counterclaims with her before any action is taken – and she has already vetoed one.

“There’s an increased level of scrutiny now,” said Delaney, adding that he’s “not an aggressive counterclaim person myself.”

In a March 2007 series, The Spokesman-Review reported on a decade’s worth of claims against the city since 1996 for the actions of its police officers and the $2.5 million the city has paid to settle those claims.

Through its self-insured liability fund, the city paid settlements in 303 of 724 claims for injuries, property damage and civil rights violations since 1996, according to a claims database obtained from the city in a public records request.

More than half of the $2.5 million went into a 1997 settlement with the Spokane Gypsy family of Grover and Jimmy Marks after illegal police searches of their homes in 1986 – an event that sparked 11 years of litigation and grew into Spokane’s most notorious civil rights case.

The newspaper’s review of two dozen recent civil rights claims showed the city routinely countersued citizens who pursued those claims, accusing them of “conspiracy to misuse the judicial process” and forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves and pay the city if the countersuit succeeded.

Since 1996, civil rights complaints have accounted for more than 10 percent of the complaints that resulted in settlements against the Police Department.

The newspaper also found that countersuits are not filed routinely in the state’s other major cities, and lawyers for Spokane County said they rarely use the tactic.

Critics say the countersuit tactic – allowable under a Washington law intended to protect police officers from frivolous lawsuits – has a chilling effect on legitimate claims and is overused in Spokane.

The city never admits wrongdoing due to its self-insured status and “fights tooth and nail” against any claim, attorney Richard Wall said last year. On Wednesday, he said it was “a good move on the mayor’s part” to pull back on countersuits, which were being used as a scare tactic.

Wall won a $125,000 settlement from the city in 2006 for his client, Mackenzie Bristow, after the attorney filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city for the actions of a Spokane police detective in Bristow’s wrongful arrest.

The city countersued Bristow, accusing her of malicious prosecution. But after a federal judge ruled in October 2006 that her arrest probably “failed to meet the threshold for probable cause,” the Spokane City Council agreed to settle the case.

Wall and attorneys for the Center for Justice also asserted that Assistant City Attorney Rocky Treppiedi, who has defended the Spokane Police Department since the 1980s and who filed many of the counterclaims, has encouraged police misconduct with his aggressive litigation against citizens.

Treppiedi, in a written response to the newspaper for the 2007 series, said he’d never filed a counterclaim “without a legal and factual basis behind it.”

Treppiedi’s role defending the Police Department was thrust into the limelight during the Spokane Gypsy case and again in 2006 during a series of high-profile police controversies, including destruction of evidence in a firehouse sex tryst and the death of Otto Zehm after a police beating.

Nearly 2 1/2 years later, the FBI has still not announced the results of its investigation into Zehm’s death.