Lawsuit over police chief hire costs St. Louis County $889K, with more to come

A legal battle between St. Louis County and a police lieutenant colonel passed over for police chief started out messy and has only gotten more so in the nearly six years it has dragged on. It’s also gotten expensive for the county, which to date has spent nearly $900,000 on a private law firm to handle the matter. The suit has been on the cusp of going to trial at least twice—most recently last May, when a tornado severely damaged the plaintiff’s attorney’s law offices on the Friday before the trial was supposed to start, necessitating a delay. 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. The controversy began in 2019. That year, Troy Doyle, who is currently Ferguson’s police chief, says he was promised the job of police chief by County Executive Sam Page, who was then serving as executive in an interim role and had to run to keep the job in 2020. The two met at Page’s home, where Doyle alleges Page told him that he was“the right person for the job” and that a Black man leading the county police department for the first time would be “historic.” The position of police chief is chosen by the five-member county Board of Police Commissioners, which themselves are chosen by the county executive and approved by the County Council. But Page’s board gave Doyle only one 20-minute job interview before choosing instead Mary Barton. Doyle’s lawsuit alleges that Barton’s pick stemmed from pressure put on the board by the St. Louis Police Foundation and Page’s desire not to alienate corporate campaign donors. (Doyle, the lawsuit notes, had been outspoken in identifying and opposing conduct within the St. Louis County Police Department that was racially offensive or discriminatory.) In July 2020, Doyle filed a charge of discrimination against the county with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights, a precursor to filing a discrimination lawsuit. Two months later, the county brought in law firm Lewis Rice to handle the case. Doyle sued the county in 2021. At the time, he was a nearly 30-year veteran of the department. Even the filing of that lawsuit was not without controversy. Doyle’s attorney, Jerome Dobson, called Page’s chief of staff to let him know he planned to file suit ahead of the primary unless the matter could be resolved beforehand. In a letter to Dobson, County Counselor Beth Orwick called this extortion. The County hired Lewis Rice to defend it, with the County Council signing off on the hire by a 4–3 vote. Dissenting members said that they wanted there to be some kind of financial limit in place. “Without some kind of cap or oversight, I have to vote no,” Councilman Mark Harder told the Post-Dispatch’s Jeremy Kohler at the time. Lewis Rice has since invoiced the county $889,448 for its work on the matter. In a brief phone conversation, Doyle said that he couldn’t talk about the lawsuit itself. But as for the high six figures the county had spent fighting it, he said, “Golly, that’s a lot of money.” County spokesman Doug Moore says that the use of an outside law firm is often in the interest of taxpayers. “Over the past few years, we have successfully faced a wide variety of complicated legal issues that require expertise that our county counselor’s office does not always have,” he says. He noted that it was outside counsel that won $169 million for the county in the Rams litigation. It was also with outside counsel that the county was able to join the fight against big opioid companies, winning more than $79 million for county coffers. Lewis Rice also handled the county’s appeal in the lawsuit brought by a county police lieutenant who a jury awarded $20 million after he said he was passed over promotion because he is gay. On appeal, that sum was knocked down to a little over $10 million. The Doyle lawsuit is but one battle among many between attorneys from Lewis Rice working on behalf of the county and Dobson. Dobson represented two Black county police lieutenants, James Morgan and Ray Rice, who sued for racial discrimination in 2020. Lewis Rice is handling that matter for the County. (Rice’s suit was dismissed last August but Morgan’s case remains alive.) Dobson also represents a county Health Department employee suing her former employer for discrimination. Lewis Rice is handling that case, too. The county’s current contract with Lewis Rice services sets a limit of what the firm can be paid on the Doyle case at $935,000. Right now, the matter is set for trial in August. The County Counselor‘s office will have to go to the council for more money if Lewis Rice’s fees end up exceeding that figure—which seems inevitable unless the case settles soon. Attorneys with Lewis Rice have accused Dobson in court filings of withholding discovery material pertinent to the case, including messages indicating Doyle was aware of other reasons as to why he might have been passed over for the job, in particular a previous bankruptcy. Other discovery that the county says they had to work harder than they should have to get showed that Doyle provided “confidential information regarding ongoing criminal investigations and personnel matters” to a specific unnamed news reporter. In his own court filings, Dobson denies any withholding of discovery material, noting that Doyle had his home computer and other electronic devices handed over to a third party to be searched for material relevant to the suit. Any oversights, he says, were quickly remedied. Also extending the billable hours on this case is the fact that Doyle has expanded its scope significantly since the original filing. In the summer of 2021, Barton stepped down as police chief after 16 months on the job and was replaced by Kenneth Gregory. Doyle subsequently amended his lawsuit arguing he was passed over in that case, too. The two parties are due in court for a pre-trial conference in late July. But they will meet in court several times sooner than that. The Morgan lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in May. The Department of Health lawsuit has its next hearing in court on Thursday.