October 12, 2009
October 12, 2009
Today, the Oregon Court of Appeals entered a judgment for nearly $195,000 to the estate of Dorothy English. This judgment represents the attorney fees and costs which Dorothy incurred in fighting her case against Multnomah County at the Oregon Court of Appeals. In an earlier decision, the Oregon Court of Appeals had awarded Dorothy’s estate $1,150,000 in compensation against Multnomah County, and also found that the estate was entitled to the attorney fees and costs incurred in fighting the Measure 37 claim in Multnomah County Circuit Court. These fees and costs are expected to exceed $300,000.
In sum, Multnomah County will be paying Dorothy’s estate in excess of $2,000,000 as a result of their decision to make her life miserable and fight every court ruling they lost. That’s what you get for being unreasonable. Here’s how the Court of Appeals summarized Dorothy’s case:
“We emphasize, finally, that, although the services rendered by English’s attorneys were extremely intensive – indeed, exhaustive – their efforts were necessitated by the county’s obdurate refusal to satisfy the just compensation judgment that had been rendered final by the county’s dismissal of its own appeal from that judgment. It is not unfair to say that this became a war of attrition that should never have had to have been fought.
In sum, the county’s conduct has protracted this litigation, and created additional work in a case that required prompt resolution due to English’s advanced age and ultimately, after her death during the pendency of this appeal, the substitution of the personal representative of her estate as the real party in interest. In the end, English obtained a result that she accurately describes as ‘ensuring recovery of $1.15 million, a complete victory.” (citations to ORS provisions omitted).
Rarely does a court use words like these to describe a party’s conduct in a lawsuit, but Multnomah County made it a point to fight Dorothy at every step of the way, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. This case is near its end, and Multnomah County should cut its losses, pay its debt, and apologize to Dorothy’s family for the way their employees have behaved.
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When you fight local government make sure to legally write in the settlement results into your will, because only your kids will see it.
Dorothy is smiling down on us now.
As usual the county commissioners who were behind this abuse of individual property rights are gone and/or forgotten. Maybe if they were made personally liable in even some small way, they might have acted differently.
Grandma will not be smiling until the “Bastards” write a check payable to her estate. The attorney’s are happy over every paper victory and I keep telling them that it simply means nothing until the county writes a check. Grandma has been winning for years and the county keeps spending and wasting tax payer dollars on appeals. Many non-property owners view this as a “greedy grandma enterprise” that is going to take police officers off the street and bankrupt Multnomah county. Well, the sky will not fall. I wish these commissioners and county attorneys were personally liable, perhaps then they would see what stress it puts on a family and the losses they bare.
I hope the day comes when we truly have a victory, I would love to see grandma smile again.
Doug
Reminds me of the fraud we call disability insurance.
You’re disabled. You can’t work. You’re broke.
You get denied. You get denied again.
You finally get your appeal four,five years later.
You’re then told that your window of eligiblity has expired
because they have taken so damn log. “Backlog”
This has happened to hundreds of thousands of Americans.
To add insult to injury, if you do get your settlement, they come back years later and tell you an error occured, or the law changed, or an interpretation of said law changed. You weren’t supposed to be eligible. You have now been “overpaid” and they want their money back. You have been scraping along on the crappy $600 a month that they pay and somehow you were supposed to have clairvoyance that you couldn’t spend any of it. People literally die waiting for their benefits. There was a front page story in the Oregonian last year that ran for three days. Government has failed.
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Whoa, I had no idea this case is still going on? How long has this been? What a travesty of justice. And just where are those original County Commissioners who kept this case going, this lawsuit even surpassed their terms.