Federal Judge Dismisses LMA Suit

BRADENTON – In a lengthy ruling issued Dec. 30 that cited a litany of procedural issues, U.S. District Judge Charlene Honeywell dismissed, with prejudice, the near entirety of former district charter school Lincoln Memorial Academy's suit against the Manatee School District and City of Palmetto.

The lawsuit is the result of the school district's controversial use of emergency powers to retake the district charter school. Click here for more on the background of this story.

Honeywell, in no uncertain terms, took great issue with the lack of procedural specificity in regard to which plaintiffs may have been subjected to damages from which defendants. In an atypical introduction, Honeywell spoke to the convoluted nature of the case brought forth by the plaintiffs.

"Ordinarily, the Court would begin with a recitation of relevant facts," wrote Honeywell. "But this action’s painfully confusing development demands a different approach. Plaintiffs Lincoln Memorial Academy, Eddie Hundley, Dr. Melvia Scott, Jauna Phillips, Katrina Ross, and Angella Enrisma (collectively, "Plaintiffs“) bring this action. Some of them initiated the action on February 11, 2020. The First Amended Complaint followed shortly thereafter. With exhibits, that pleading was 96 pages long. The Court dismissed it, without prejudice, as a shotgun pleading. Now, the operative pleading is the 69-page Second Amended Complaint. With exhibits, it swells to 237 pages. It, too, is a shotgun pleading."

A shotgun pleading is a judicial term for a strategy that utilizes an unnecessarily broad approach that makes it difficult or even impossible for the respondents to mount a coherent, intelligible defense. They are described in four categories:

1) A complaint with multiple counts that incorporate the allegations of every preceding one;

2) A complaint with conclusory, vague, or immaterial facts not connected to a specific claim;

3) A complaint that does not separate each claim into a different count; and

4) A complaint with multiple claims against multiple defendants without specifying which defendant is responsible for an act or omission, or which defendant a claim is against.

In the 85-page order (click here to read), Honeywell seems to cite examples of multiple varieties, though, most often, they seemed to fall into the fourth category listed above. It is important to note that the vast majority were procedural and few of the judge's criticisms were material. The plaintiffs have 30 days from the ruling to appeal, and their attorney, Roderick Ford, told TBT in an email statement he intends to do so.

"U.S. District Court Judge Honeywell's dismissal order is a gross miscarriage of justice, does not reflect either the letter or spirit of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and shall be appealed to the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals," wrote Ford.