by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas

“ The Court will not follow the defendants' suggestion that the plaintiffs are only entitled to 10% of their total fee request. If we were to use required trial time on the successful issues as the sole factor then defendants would have a valid point. But [p250] the Court believes this argument ignores the degree of plaintiffs' overall success including the role of this class action in establishing a citizen complaint procedure. That procedure is one of the remedies the plaintiffs hoped to achieve as a result of proving a pattern or practice of police brutality. ”

“ I. THE LODESTAR A. Hours Reasonably Expended When considering hours reasonably expended, the Hensley Court focused on "billing judgment." To exercise billing judgment, counsel for the prevailing plaintiff "should make a good faith effort to exclude from a fee request hours that are [p244] excessive, redundant, or otherwise unnecessary . . . . Hours that are not properly billed to one's client also are not properly billed to one's adversary . ”

“ To avoid needless figuring, the Clarke court used the current billing rate to compute the attorney's fees. See also Laffey v. Northwest Airlines, Inc., 572 F. Supp. 354, 380–81 (D.C. 1983) .
Similarly, this Court finds that it tends to reach the same result whether it uses the historic rate properly supplemented or the current rate. The Eighth Circuit has not focused on this issue. However, the objective of the Eighth Circuit is clear: the hourly rate must be reasonable and, more importantly, the ultimate fee must be reasonable. ”

“ The court found that the hours plaintiffs devoted to the successful and unsuccessful claims were based on a common core of facts grounded in the same legal theories and were thus related. Stating that the claims were so interrelated that it was not feasible to strike specific hours, the district court made an adjustment to the lodestar to account for the limited success. Id. at 1031.
The prevailing parties in Phillips v. Weeks argue strenuously that all the claims, both those successfully and those unsuccessfully litigated, are related and [p247] cannot be separated for attorney fee purposes. ”

“ It is the Court's observation that if the plaintiffs only wanted to prove police misconduct involving arrests without probable cause and detention in segregated facilities and had not tried to prove police brutality, the trial would have taken three or four days rather than over 30 days.
It is this comparison of the relationship between the extent of success and the amount of the fee award that Hensley demands. The Supreme Court states:
" [T] he most critical factor is the degree of success obtained. ”

“ The Court has also concluded that the plaintiffs were only successful in bringing about 25% of the results they sought when those results are compared to the scope of the litigation as a whole. Therefore, the lodestar will be reduced to reflect this level of success, resulting in an attorney fee award of $13,660.75. [3] The Court notes that the adoption of the 25% figure has the indirect effect of giving considerable enhancement to any straight-line assessment of plaintiffs' attorneys' time devoted solely to claims upon which plaintiffs prevailed. ”

“ Mays served on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Defendants' objections to these hour totals are: (1) the attorneys took an inordinate amount of time to accomplish their tasks; (2) that the billing time is too routine to represent actual time and suggests that the records are arbitrary reconstructions and (3) the time needs to be drastically reduced because the plaintiffs failed in their major effort to prove police brutality. The Court will address these objections in this order. ”

“ The fee award will be reduced accordingly.
C. Enhancement Considerations The plaintiffs' attorneys submit that an upward adjustment of the lodestar amount by 50% should be employed. The Hensley Court states: "Where a plaintiff has obtained excellent results, his attorney should recover a fully compensatory fee. Normally this will encompass all hours reasonably expended on the litigation, and indeed in some cases of exceptional success an enhanced award may be justified." Hensley at 1940. ”

“ The alleged violations included the living conditions, use of restraints, adequacy of medical treatment, access to legal material, use of disciplinary segregation, censorship of mail, use of telephones, and restrictions on visitations. ”

“ We conclude that eliminating hours for unsuccessful claims does not properly arise under the narrow inquiry of billing judgment, but must take place under a much broader analytical framework. See below. For purposes of computing the lodestar, the Court will accept the totals as submitted by the attorneys in their affidavits.
B. Reasonable Hourly Rate The work on this case began in 1972 and continued until 1983, with Richard Mays working 425.5 of his total 554.3 hours in the year 1974. Thus much of the fee would ordinarily have been billable 10 years ago. ”