MOUNT VERNON — Timelines with respect to legal issues and lawsuits related to John Freshwater are overlapping, and apparently causing some difficulty for R. Kelly Hamilton, Freshwater’s attorney, to meet the respective filing deadlines.
There are three legal proceedings in progress — the school board’s Freshwater contract termination hearing; the Doe family lawsuit against Freshwater; and the Freshwater civil case against the Mount Vernon School District Board of Education, et al.
The deadline for filing written closing arguments in the contract termination hearing, originally set for July 26, was moved to Monday and then extended to Aug. 13.
Freshwater and Hamilton are facing sanctions for not meeting discovery deadlines in the Doe versus Freshwater case, and at least one extension has been granted in the discovery phase of Freshwater’s civil suit against the MVBOE, et al. Hamilton. Freshwater’s attorney, has opposed the school’s motion for sanctions for Freshwater’s failure to meet other deadlines related to the case.
“Since June 9, 2010, the undersigned has had to progress the brief due in the administrative hearing by reading over 6,000 pages of transcript, sorting the categories of evidence and 350 exhibits, and preparing a comprehensive written response to the volumes of evidence,” Hamilton wrote to the court.
“Plaintiffs Freshwater have been able to provide initial responses to this group of Defendants discovery and complete responses to Defendant [Lynda] Weston’s discovery. But the undersigned attests I simply cannot keep up with the demands of both cases as I have already turned away other paying clients and cannot budget another minute in the day. The undersigned does not have an issue with balancing time but rather simply not enough time in each day nor stamina to proceed any faster.”
Because of the lack of time to properly prepare documents, Hamilton has asked the Judge Gregory Frost to deny the board’s request to compel Hamilton to respond to discovery requests and to impose sanctions for noncompliance as well as extend his response time.
