Bellaire legal bills three times settlement
Outcome in civil rights suit results in mixed opinions including ‘taxpayers are getting hit’
After more than six years of litigation and at the moment last week when jury selection was to begin, the city of Bellaire agreed to pay $110,000 to a man shot by a police officer.
But the municipality will pay at least three times that amount for its legal representation — more than $370,000 — and the total doesn’t include the final bill from the police liability attorneys who represented the city and Lt. Jeffrey Cotton, who shot aspiring professional baseball player Robbie Tolan.
Bellaire officials hired Bill Helfand and Norman Giles with the legal firm of Chamberlain Hrdlicka to defend the lawsuit filed in 2009 by Tolan, his parents and his cousin.
According to public records, the city made its first payment to the firm in May 2009 and made its latest and largest so far — $76,027.10 — on Sept. 17.
“There will be a final invoice,” Helfand said. “It is being prepared.”
On Wednesday, after learning the price Bellaire paid to defend itself and its officer, Tolan family lawyer Daryl Washington said: “The taxpayers are getting hit on cases that should settle.”
Even though the claims against Bellaire were thrown out before trial and only the case against Cotton remained, the city — which is self-insured — also will pay the $110,000 to the Tolans, Helfand said.
The settlement agreement states that the city and Cotton “have consistently denied liability in this matter” but that the municipality is paying the money “in compromise and settlement of a disputed claim to avoid further expense of litigation and disruption of public service.”
Local civil rights attorneys had varied reactions to the amount of the Tolan settlement.
“That’s not very much to get shot and go to the hospital,” said Randall Kallinen, who regularly files lawsuits against police for alleged misconduct. “Let’s say you were in a car accident and it ruined your career — that’s a multimillion-dollar case.”
Ben Hall, a current mayoral candidate and former Houston city attorney, told a radio audience on Tuesday that he declined to represent the Tolans because he thought the case would be difficult to win.
“The law is so in favor of police officers that getting $110,000 in that case — I’m not talking about whether justice was served, I’m talking about in terms of compliance with the law — it’s $110,000 more than I thought that they would ever get in the case,” he said during “The Ben Hall Legal Hour” on KCOH 1230 AM.
Unlike other unarmed black men shot by police in recent highprofile incidents that sparked street demonstrations, motivated national movements and inspired feature films, Tolan, now 30, lived to tell his story. His settlement is minuscule compared with other payouts this summer to survivors of black men who were killed by police in other cities.
This month, Baltimore city leaders approved a $6.4 million settlement with the relatives of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody in April. A Cleveland federal jury on Sept. 8 awarded $5.5 million to the estate of Kenneth Smith, a 20-year-old hip-hop artist who was fatally shot in 2012 by an off-duty officer. In July, the city of New York reached a $5.9 million settlement with the estate of 43-year-old Eric Garner, who died last year after police used a banned maneuver, a chokehold, to restrain him.
Tolan, his parents — Bobby and Marian Tolan — and his cousin, Anthony Cooper, alleged that their civil rights were violated during an incident on Dec. 31, 2008, that began with a traffic stop outside the Tolans’ home. The episode erupted into scuffles and ended with Cotton shooting Robbie Tolan. The lawsuit claimed that Tolan and Cooper, who are black, came under suspicion because the police department has a history of racially profiling people of color.
This year, other federal lawsuits against Houston-area police agencies have led to financial settlements for the plaintiffs.
The city of Webster settled this month with Mani Mobasser, an entrepreneur who sued four officers in February, alleging false arrest. Kallinen, his lawyer, said the amount was $62,500.
A $150,000 settlement deal ended the June trial of a case brought by the parents of a mentally ill man, Aaron Hobart, who was fatally shot in 2009 by a Stafford police officer responding to a psychiatric crisis call. The week before, on the eve of trial, Kimberley Diamond-Brooks and Valerie Ann Gonzales agreed to resolve their lawsuit against Webster police officer Raymond Berryman about an injurious 2011 encounter.
In both cases, like the Tolan lawsuit, the cities were eventually excluded as defendants, but paid the settlements.
It’s also not unusual for a municipality and its employees to be represented by the same lawyers.
“They do that to keep officers on the job,” Kallinen said. “If it is known that you can get sued by anybody and the city wouldn’t back you up, the officers wouldn’t want to work there.”