ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

ST. LOUIS — There’s an important story about government obfuscation in the $18,400 bill that U.S. Magistrate Judge Shirley Mensah recently handed to attorney Lawrence Pratt.

Until early January, Pratt worked for the city counselor’s office in St. Louis, which is managed by City Counselor Sheena Hamilton. Pratt was the lead lawyer defending former St. Louis police Officer Kyle Chandler in a civil case. Chandler in 2015 shot and killed 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey. The shooting, not long after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, drew media attention and questions about the actions of Chandler and other officers.

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

For that lawsuit and a separate police shooting suit, Ball-Bey’s lawyers deposed Engelhardt, who told them about a secret audit of all FIU investigations he led. The lawyers — including Javad Khazaeli, Jack Waldron and Jermaine Wooten — demanded the audit from the city. The audit was provided to the court but sealed from public view. The city has refused to make it public, even after Sunshine Law requests by me and Engelhardt.

Last fall, Mensah ordered the city to produce documents relevant to the lawsuit among 11 boxes that make up the full investigation into the FIU. Pratt, the lead lawyer in the case, didn’t do it. According to court documents, he even kept information from the other members of the city counselor’s office, not to mention the judge and the lawyers on the opposing side.

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

“He was the most senior attorney on the case, he was handling the production of documents, he failed to produce the documents as ordered by the Court, he repeatedly failed to respond to Plaintiff’s counsel’s attempts to address that failure, and he repeatedly represented to his co-counsel that the relevant documents had been produced when they had not,� the judge wrote.

Pratt no longer works for the city counselor’s office. He now works for the St. Louis County counselor’s office, where he’s defending similar cases: lawsuits filed over jail deaths. He did not respond to my request for comment about the sanctions and the bill Mensah handed him.

The reality is that city taxpayers are likely on the hook for that money. And those taxpayers are going to want answers about why the city is fighting so hard to hide a report on whether police shootings are properly investigated. Portions of the FIU audit that the Post-Dispatch has obtained suggest many of those investigations were “shoddy“ at best.

Mensah has been clear that the city needs to make the audit public. But the city counselor’s office in February appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. More than four months later, the city has yet to detail its arguments 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 Sunshine Law request, the city argued that the audit is a personnel record. Mensah, who has read the audit, has ruled that it most definitely is not. The city’s legal briefs to the appeals court are due Friday.

The clock is ticking. The words Mensah wrote in an order earlier this year are truer than ever, and now they come attached with an $18,400 bill.

“The public interest in this claim,� she wrote, “is very high.�