The federal government will pay more than $41,000 in legal fees and expenses after a Washington federal judge found U.S. Department of Justice lawyers committed “egregious misconduct” in their handling of discovery.
The underlying lawsuit involves a challenge to how the Federal Bureau of Prisons treats inmates classified as terrorists. On Jan. 15, U.S. District Senior Judge Royce Lamberth found lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington committed a series of errors in discovery, including missed deadlines, the production of discovery on a rolling basis and the submission of information without the proper signature.
Lamberth ordered the government to pay fees to the plaintiff’s lawyers, Michael Kirkpatrick and Jehan Patterson of Public Citizen Litigation Group, for the time they spent working on the discovery issues. Requiring the government to pay would make it “clear that the Court totally and categorically rejects the practice of the government in this case,” Lamberth wrote in January.
