The State - News from June 12, 1987

For the second time in the same case, a federal judge in San Francisco imposed monetary penalties for misconduct on government attorneys. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said the lawyers had deliberately defied her order to produce documents and had misrepresented their intent to comply. Patel said she would not hold the attorneys in contempt, but directed the government to pay any additional attorney costs--expected to approach $50,000--that the plaintiffs might have incurred because of the delay. In April, Patel imposed $120,000 in penalties for another failure to produce documents. Both sanctions were imposed in a class-action case against the Veterans Administration, seeking to declare unconstitutional an 1864 law limiting to $10 the fee a veteran can pay a lawyer representing him against the VA.