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The $125,000 payment to attorneys who challenged Wilkes-Barre’s ‘One Strike’ ordinance is more than what was awarded to the landlords and tenants they represented.
The payout was the final piece needed to close the case that ended in August with a deal awarding the plaintiffs $100,000 and a promise from the city not to enforce the ordinance that was declared unconstitutional.
Attorney Vic Walczak of the American Civil Liberties Union in Pittsburgh, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, confirmed the case was over.
“The case has finally been settled,” Walczak said Tuesday. “The total payout, including attorneys’ fees, is $225,000.”
The ordinance went into effect in 2013 while the city was experiencing a wave of violent crimes. It recorded 13 homicide victims that year. Then Mayor Tom Leighton sought a way that the city could deal with the crime he blamed on out-of-town landlords more concerned about rent money than assuring their tenants were law abiding. City council passed a law that allowed the city to evict residents and shut down properties for six months where suspected drug and gun crimes occurred.
Walczak and other attorneys filed suit in 2015 in U.S. Middle District Court, Scranton, arguing that the law gave the city the authority to act first and denied landlords and tenants their constitutionally guaranteed rights against illegal searches and cruel and unusual punishment and denied them due process by providing a hearing after the fact.
The enforcement of the ordinance caused “extreme hardship,” Walczak said. “This never should have happened in the first place,” he added.