Court Wrap Up, December 1, 2020

With the ‘holiday’ weekend, there haven’t been too many changes in court cases, but I’m still trying to keep up on stuff. One case that I spoke about last week, the case of retired Officer Hollins suing the city for racial discrimination, has narrowly avoided him taking a default judgement against the city when at the last minute Portland filed their affirmative defense motion in the case. I’m starting to wonder if they lost the case in a pile of paperwork until they got the intent to take default notice and narrowly avoided soiling their breeches.

In other city related news, the suit against Southwest Neighborhoods, Inc, or SWNI had an amended answer to the original complaint filed today. This case involves a public records request of the organization, under the belief that they, by doing largely work for the city, would be subject to public record laws. The county DA agreed with the premise, but SWNI didn’t, prompting the suit. Shortly after Alan Kessler came out on Twitter talking about the forensic audit that SWNI went through that put their use of government grants and funds ethically into question, they suddenly amended their initial answer. The one difference between the new one and the old one? A claim of ‘unclean hands’ on the part of the plaintiffs. Without detailing what they claim the clients, who were former board members, supposedly have done, legal counsel for SWNI is stating that the only reason this suit got as far as it did was because of unethical behavior on the part of Mr. Kessler’s clients. While I anxiously await the details of this claim, it does seem interesting that the timing came shortly after the audit was performed, which Mr. Kessler described as “ugly”, with up to $180k is financial mismanagement for 2010 through 2020.

Well … that’s all I got for now. There will definitely be more coming up soon though, as we wait for decisions from judges and have a few hearings coming up in the next week.