Lumpencitizens Ordered to Pay Legal Fees and Costs

Harsh lessons for Emerald City citizen litigants

Bad news this morning in the Standard-Examiner for the 58 plaintiffs in the 2007 election lawsuit. As Ace Reporter Schwebke reports, Judge Parley Baldwin has issued a decision awarding the prevailing defendants $15,167 in costs and fees, under provisions of Utah Code Section 78-27-56.

For the benefit of those readers who'd like read Judge Baldwin's full text decision, we provide an online PDF version, straight from our storage site.

Interestingly, Judge Baldwin actually chopped the award nearly in half from the $29,000 originally demanded by defendants. Whether Judge Baldwin believed the defendants' cost bill was excessive, or he merely split the difference between the demands of the plaintiffs and defendants, we'll probably never know, unless the matter goes up on appeal.

Also very interesting is Mr. Schwebke's reporting that the defendants may be preparing to avail themselves of another bite of the apple under provisions of Rule 11 of the Utah Rules of Civil Procedure, a code section that's aimed squarely at Utah lawyers who file and prosecute frivolous lawsuits. In this connection, we've believed all along that any costs and fees awarded for a frivolous filing in this action might ultimately be borne by Attorney Bernard's malpractice insurance, and not by a collection of plaintiffs unlearned in the intricacies of the law, lumpencitizen plaintiffs who retained an experienced attorney, remained mainly out of the loop, and relied upon council's presumably learned advice.

And we would have sworn, reading the flow of Judge Baldwin's written decision, that he was leaning toward letting everyone except plaintiff Littrell completely off the hook; and yet he nevertheless clobbered them all in the end. Read the memorandum yourselves, gentle readers, and ask yourselves why Judge Baldwin finally decided to issue the award against these secondary plaintiffs. Although this decision is probably technically within his judicial discretion, the result certainly doesn't seem just, under the peculiar facts of the case.

And we'll note one final curiosity, especially for those sharp-eyed readers who opened the above link to Utah Code Section 78-27-56, and noticed the citation came from a second party website (justia.com), and NOT from the state legislature's official online code service. There's a reason for that. Utah Code Section 78-27-56 no longer appears in the Utah Code, at least not in the online version, as far as we were able to determine through a quick search this morning. Whether it appears re-numbered as another code section we haven't been able to determine. But it's something both the plaintiffs and their attorney certainly ought to check out.

As for the prospect of appeal, we would strongly urge these plaintiffs and their attorney to continuing to pursue this matter at the appellate court level. Having taken it upon themselves to act as private Attornies General, we believe it would be a shame to drop the ball now, and leave future citizen litigants with bad precedent for well grounded future citizen-propelled litigation.

This case certainly grows interestinger and interestinger...