Judge fines St. Louis lawyer for documents on police-involved shootings

ST. LOUIS — A major story about a government cover-up is inside an $18,400 bill that District Judge Shirley Mensah recently handed to attorney Lawrence Pratt.

Until early January, Pratt worked in the St. Louis city attorney’s office, which was managed by city attorney Sheena Hamilton. Pratt was the lead attorney defending former St. Louis police officer Kyle Chandler in a civil case in which Chandler shot and killed 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey in 2015. The shooting, which came shortly after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, drew media attention and raised questions about the actions of Chandler and other officers.

The city’s Force Investigative Unit, then headed by Lt. Roger Engelhardt, investigated the shooting, as it does all police shootings. The FIU released a report to then-District Attorney Jennifer Joyce, who declined to charge Chandler. Ball-Bey’s father, Dennis, filed a wrongful death lawsuit several years later.

In connection with that lawsuit and a separate lawsuit over a police shooting, Ball-Bey’s lawyers interviewed Engelhardt, who told them about a secret audit of all FIU investigations he had conducted. The lawyers—including Javad Khazaeli, Jack Waldron, and Jermaine Wooten—sought the city to produce the audit. The audit was turned over to the court but sealed from the public. The city refused to make it public, even after Sunshine Law’s requests from Engelhardt and me.

Last fall, Mensah ordered the city to produce documents relevant to the lawsuit from 11 boxes that make up the full FIU investigation. Pratt, the lead attorney in the case, failed to do so. According to court documents, he even hid information from other members of the city attorney’s office, not to mention the judge and opposing attorneys.

So in January, Mensah said she would order sanctions. That included allowing Ball-Bey’s lawyers to review all the documents in the 11 boxes. Then, last month, she billed him for $18,400, blaming Pratt.

“He was the most senior attorney in this case, handled the preparation of documents but failed to produce them as ordered by the court, repeatedly failed to respond to plaintiff’s counsel’s attempts to address the issue, and repeatedly assured his co-counsel that he had produced the appropriate documents when he had not,” the judge wrote.

Pratt no longer works for the city attorney’s office. He now works for the St. Louis County attorney’s office, where he defends similar cases: lawsuits filed in connection with deaths in custody. He did not respond to my request for comment on the sanctions and the bill Mensah handed him.

The truth is, city taxpayers will likely have to pay that money. And those taxpayers will want answers about why the city is trying so hard to hide a report on whether police shootings are properly investigated. Excerpts from the FIU audit obtained by the Post-Dispatch suggest that many of those investigations were “shoddy” at best.

Mensah has made it clear that the city must make the audit public. But in February, the city attorney’s office appealed the decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. More than four months later, the city has yet to make its case for keeping the audit secret. Instead, it has filed a series of motions asking the court for more time to file legal briefs.

In previous filings and in response to my request from Sunshine Law, the city has argued that the audit is a personnel record. Mensah, who has read the audit, said it clearly is not. The city’s legal memorandum to the appellate court is due Friday.

The clock is ticking. Mensah’s words written in an order earlier this year ring truer than ever, and now they’re attached to an $18,400 bill.

“Public interest in this claim,” she wrote, “is very high.”