Blackshire files yield talks peek
Starks role ‘deal breaker’
Correspondence records obtained from the city of Little Rock through an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act request show the legal team for Bradley Blackshire’s estate at one point made a counteroffer of $635,000 amid settlement negotiations meant to end litigation against the city stemming from a 2019 police shooting.
A letter dated June 15 from the estate’s attorneys said the figure represented a reduced amount from their earlier demand.
According to the final settlement terms that were disclosed publicly in October, Little Rock and the Arkansas Municipal League agreed to pay Blackshire’s estate a total of $300,000.
The Municipal League, which provided legal representation for the city,
agreed to pay $250,500 as its share of the sum and Little Rock, through the office of City Manager Bruce Moore, agreed to pay $49,500.
The settlement proceeds will be divided among Blackshire’s relatives and the estate’s attorneys pursuant to a probate court judge’s order.
Non-monetary terms to the settlement require the city to take additional steps, including implementing new training on the use of force and de-escalation, with an eye to when it is appropriate to draw a firearm and how officers should approach an occupied vehicle during a high-risk encounter.
Nevertheless, the extent and nature of the training will be left up to the Police Department’s sole discretion under the settlement’s terms.
The city also will have to produce a video featuring a Blackshire family member in which the relative will explain how his death affected the family, to be shown to police recruits for at least 10 years. Finally, the city must provide information about affordable mental health counseling to family members of individuals killed by police.
After the settlement agreement, at the Blackshire estate’s request, a federal judge Tuesday dismissed with prejudice the claims the estate had brought in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
Blackshire was shot and killed by then-officer Charles Starks on Feb. 22, 2019, while behind the wheel of a vehicle that had been reported stolen.
Attorneys for his estate later sued the city, Starks and Michael Simpson, the first backup officer to arrive at the scene. Simpson has since resigned from the Police Department.
Starks was terminated shortly after the shooting for violating police rules governing the use of force when confronted with a moving vehicle. He was reinstated by a Pulaski County Circuit Court judge, but chose to resign from the department last year.
The Arkansas Court of Appeals recently returned the reinstatement decision to the lower court for more review.
Starks will not pay anything as a result of the settlement agreement, his attorney Robert Newcomb said recently. However, a mediated discussion between the former officer and Blackshire’s family has been planned as part of the agreement, according to Newcomb.
The settlement became embroiled in controversy at the Little Rock Board of Directors meeting last month after City Attorney Tom Carpenter objected to the agreement. He argued that the policy components required the board’s oversight and said Moore’s authority to unilaterally authorize a purchase under a $50,000 threshold did not apply in this instance.
Carpenter’s office had withdrawn from the litigation and turned the city’s defense over to the Municipal League in August 2020 as a result of a perceived conflict tied to separate litigation that had been filed against the police chief by his colleagues.
City directors said they were dismayed by the settlement process and expressed concerns about how they were apparently left out of the loop, along with the city attorney.
Nonetheless, board members ultimately voted Nov. 2 to give Moore authorization to execute the agreement.
The June 15 letter from the Blackshire estate’s legal team said they took issue with a request from Little Rock’s attorneys to include Starks in the negotiations and have the estate’s claims against him dismissed, in addition to claims against the city and Simpson.
The request to include Starks came at nearly the ninth hour of a recent mediation, the attorneys wrote.
Attorneys for the estate wrote that the request, “which was not previously made during months of discussion, was framed as an apparent deal breaker for the City,” adding that the request represented “a stark departure that has seriously altered the landscape of Plaintiff’s position.”
“While the Blackshire family was very troubled by this late-coming request and we were initially inclined to increase our demand, we are willing to continue making progress in these discussions in good faith,” attorneys wrote. “In light of these new developments and the latest offer extended by the City, we will reduce our demand to $635,000, inclusive of fees and costs.”
Blackshire’s estate was presented by the Chicago law firm Loevy and Loevy, as well as attorneys Lauren A. Johnson of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Omavi Shukur, a practitioner-in-residence at Columbia University.
When reached by phone Friday, David B. Owens, a Loevy and Loevy attorney representing Blackshire’s estate, suggested the city of Little Rock had erred in providing the letter and said it should not have been disclosed to the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act.
He requested that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette not write about the letter. Owens declined to answer questions about the settlement negotiations that had been provided to him and his co-counsel via email one day earlier.
“The settlement and the discussions about the settlement are confidential. I am not going to answer — we are not going to answer — any questions about the way in which a settlement was reached,” Owens said.
Attorneys for Blackshire’s estate in the June 15 letter addressed the non-monetary side to a potential settlement agreement and acknowledged the city’s concerns about including written policy changes as part of an agreement.
“We are willing to include language in the settlement agreement to allay these concerns,” they wrote. “For example, the City could agree to make the requested changes, provided they do not jeopardize the City’s CALEA [Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies] accreditation or somehow run afoul of the law, in which case the City could make any necessary changes.”
The letter from the attorneys also requested that the city make an exception to an informal practice related to the use of incidents as training modules, and asked that the city use the Blackshire shooting as part of its police training.
Additionally, attorneys for the estate wrote that while they were aware of policy changes the city implemented in light of the 2019 shooting, they asked Little Rock to consider their requested changes to the Police Department’s training and policies, calling them “sound remedial interventions that directly address systemic issues implicated in this shooting.”
Attorneys for the Municipal League, as well as lawyers from the two outside firms the local-government group had tapped to represent Little Rock in the litigation, did not respond to questions by email pertaining to the June 15 letter.
Four of the outside attorneys appeared before the city’s Board of Directors on Oct. 19 to answer questions about the settlement.
At the meeting, Susan Kendall of the Kendall Law Firm described how an attempt at mediation was derailed at one point because on the eve of the scheduled mediation, the estate’s attorneys indicated an initial offer of $5 million, revealing their expectations were far higher, she explained.
The information from opposing counsel “revealed to us that we were not in the same ballpark for purposes of having a productive mediation,” Kendall told board members.
However, attorneys for the city agreed to continue with informal settlement negotiations with the estate’s attorneys in consultation with the mayor and city manager, Kendall said.
The other side’s position in the ensuing months developed to the point where Kendall said attorneys representing Little Rock “believed that we could get serious about potentially reaching an agreement that we could recommend.”
The June 15 letter from the Blackshire estate’s legal team said they took issue with a request from Little Rock’s attorneys to include Starks in the negotiations and have the estate’s claims against him dismissed, in addition to claims against the city and Simpson.