$1 judgment leads to claim for $818,915 in legal fees

Posted: April 5, 2004

(Holyoke-AP) -- The lawyer for a Holyoke police officer who won a dollar judgment against the city last year is now seeking nearly $819,000 in legal fees.

Lawyer Stewart Graham says together he and his co-counsel and a paralegal spent more than 3,600 hours since 1998 working on the case.

Last year a federal jury dismissed most of the claims in Police Sergeant Robert Wagner's whistleblower lawsuit against the city, a former mayor and two former police chiefs, but awarded him a dollar for violating his rights of free speech.

Holyoke lawyer John Fitzgibbon called Graham's bill ``outrageous'' and said the city would seek to reduce it.