![]() (READ MORE: 3 inmates killed in 1 week as feds sue Alabama over prisons)Ĭorrections has also faced staffing issues. Lunsford is an expert in the type of litigation involving corrections, and that the agency is "lucky to have him," Speirs said. The four ongoing injunctive cases are represented by Lunsford's firm. "Therefore, the Department of Corrections attorneys can no longer represent the Department of Corrections, so we are no longer able to bring any of them in-house, so the Attorney General's Office had to assume those." "The Attorney General's Office, in April, pulled all the assistant attorney general designations for the six attorneys at the Department of Corrections," Speirs said. Speirs said there are two categories of cases ongoing with the department: damages and injunctive relief. Chris Elliott, R-Fairhope, asked during the meeting. "Moving forward, is it the department's intention, with the Attorney General's Office, to try to handle as much of this litigation in-house to try and reduce some of these costs?" Sen. Lawmakers on the committee asked Speirs about bringing some of the representation within the agency instead of contracting out the services. Lunsford is being paid $9.9 million to defend the state in the federal lawsuit.Īnother 16 contracts, each worth $200,000, involve lawsuits over mental health services. Department of Justice sued DOC in 2020, alleging conditions in the state's men's prisons constituted a violation of inmates' Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. ![]() (READ MORE: Department of Justice condemns 'broken' Alabama prison system)Ĭorrections has been mired in legal proceedings for the past several years over violence in the facilities and allegations of poor medical and mental health treatment. So, that is perhaps something we are getting away from." I have not seen any new requests of that nature with the same firm. ![]() Robertson said she thought there "was a time period in 2019, 2020, 2021, when there was a strategy perhaps to keep some of this work with the same law firm that was handling the three big cases. "Is one individual able to handle all those cases, and how much do all those cases total out to be?" That, however, did little to assuage the concerns of lawmakers at the meeting about the size and scope of the contracts going to a single firm. Many were from 2020 but some were dated 20. Katherine Robertson, chief counsel for the Alabama Attorney General's Office, which recently took over some of DOC's litigation, read back to the committee the inception years of the contracts brought before the committee. "We discussed multiple ways to handle some of these, and we decided to handle it by bringing them back as new contracts - it made sense, so we have done that." "The lead attorney changed firms," he said. Dan Roberts, R-Mountain Brook, the chair of the committee, said in an interview after the meeting the legal contracts are effectively continuations of existing contracts. "Lunsford is basically a government agency at this point," he said. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, said the ongoing - and increasing - costs of DOC litigation concerned him. (READ MORE: Alabama Department of Corrections' internal execution review draws criticism) "If we parcel it out to different attorneys for each one, we would have duplicative efforts and cost the state more money because we are having to do the same depositions twice, the same litigation twice, because we would have different attorneys." "A lot of these cases, damages and systemic appropriation cases, have overlapping fact patterns, overlapping claims," said Mandy Speirs, assistant general counsel for the Alabama Department of Corrections. Bill Lunsford, an attorney with Butler Snow in Montgomery, received DOC contracts worth $14.9 million in the docket. Those contracts amounted to almost $16 million, or about 88% of the $18.2 million awarded to vendors by different state agencies. Lawmakers expressed concerns about the cost of litigation involving the Alabama Department of Corrections.Ĭorrections made up 31 of the 43 legal services agreements listed on Thursday's Contract Review Committee agenda.
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