A federal judge’s blistering order to the city of St. Louis and its attorneys last week ended not with a bang, but a whimper: Yesterday, Judge Matthew Schelp dismissed the lawsuit he’d derided as “slipshod” without ordering sanctions against anybody.
So how did the city and its attorneys get off the hook when Schelp initially seemed so angered? An abject apology helped, but it also goes back to the timing of the city’s lawsuit, which challenged state control of the police, and transitions at City Hall that underpinned their subsequent failure to respond to him in a timely way.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
In the city’s response to Schelp filed April 30, Mayor Cara Spencer’s new city counselor, Michael Garvin, took the lead. He wrote that an assistant city counselor prepared the brief at the order of Garvin’s predecessor, Sheena Hamilton—and, yes, filed it on Mayor Tishaura Jones’ last day in office (which was also apparently Hamilton’s last).
But rather than file a badly written suit to harass anyone, as the judge had posited, Garvin writes that the assistant city counselor simply made a mistake. The attorney, Garvin wrote, “confirms that he had no intention to harass the State, attract publicity, or make some sort of political protest. Rather, he misconstrued the pleading requirements in federal court.” The assistant wrongly applied the state standard to what was a federal lawsuit.
Then, Garvin writes, the office turned over. Neither Garvin nor Spencer had been informed of the lawsuit until after it was filed, so when Schelp demanded answers from the city, they wanted more time to figure things out. They thought they had options of either explaining themselves, amending their lawsuit, or having the suit dismissed in a way it could later be refiled—and opted for the third option to give themselves time to figure things out. They didn’t realize they were supposed to choose either an explanation or an amending.
“The Court can be sure that its admonishments to the City’s counsel are well understood and that no further action is required to deter counsel from making mistakes of this kind in the future,” Garvin wrote. “The City also hopes the Court will find that no purpose would be served by sanctioning the City itself, as the burden of such sanction would fall on the City’s taxpayers.”
And with that profuse apology, the judge cooled off.
It’s also worth noting that, in Garvin’s telling, Jefferson City attorney Chuck Hatfield, who was subject to a very pointed, very personal footnote in Schelp’s order, apparently didn’t write the lawsuit at all—but merely signed on to the city’s suit in order to represent Aldermanic President Megan Green, a potential way to keep the suit alive after the mayoral regime change.
And so at that point, Schlep responded without anger. He wrote, “The parties and their counsel timely responded to the Court’s show cause Order and satisfactorily addressed the issues that concerned the Court.” He dismissed the suit.
And with that, we can consider this matter closed—until, perhaps, the city files a new lawsuit. The city dismissed the suit in a way that would allow it to try again later.
