Around 70 lawsuits against the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department face delays and confusion amid a yearlong legal battle between lawyers for the state and the City of St. Louis.
The situation has entangled several notable cases of wrongful convictions and false arrests, including those of Lamar Johnson, Mansur Ball-Bey and Michael Holmes. Juries have already awarded millions of dollars in settlements in those cases — but the city has yet to pay any of them.
The current situation is a “legal morass where nobody really knows who’s responsible for paying these old claims,” said St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger, who has devoted multiple columns in recent months to documenting the murky legal situation facing dozens of plaintiffs…