Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
State balks at
‘excessive’ legal
fees in Rice caseHawaii taxpayers should not
By Christine Donnelly
have to pony up nearly $3 million,
says the attorney general's office
Star-BulletinLawyers who won the Rice vs. Cayetano case claimed "excessive" fees of nearly $3 million and should not be paid by Hawaii taxpayers, the state attorney general's office has argued.
A June 22 hearing is scheduled in federal court on a $2.3 million claim by the Washington firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and a $648,000 claim by lawyer John W. Goemans.
Goemans was the original lawyer for Big Island rancher Harold "Freddy" Rice and later assisted Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, which took the case once it reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Civil-rights statutes call for state governments to pay the legal fees of plaintiffs who win discrimination cases, as Rice did in February when the high court ruled it was illegal to exclude non-Hawaiians from voting in Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee elections.
But the state argued in an opposition memo filed last week that it should not have to pay because it had believed in good faith that OHA's voting restrictions were constitutional and because the fees charged were "excessive." It noted some lawyers would have taken such a career-making case for free.
Goemans earlier had vowed to use the Rice case as a precedent to undo other programs favoring native Hawaiians, but now he says he'll hold off filing more lawsuits until he gets paid.
"This will have a chilling effect on plans for future litigation, including my own," he said. "I'm not going to be doing anything further while the question of fees is uncertain."
Goemans, who called the state's arguments "absurd," said he worked on the case 2,160 hours (at $300 an hour) over 4.5 years, for a total of $648,000.
OHA Special
Rice vs. Cayetano arguments
Rice vs. Cayetano decision
