LIHUE — One of the Kauai Police Department’s top-ranking officers was reinstated last week after a seven-year absence that began amid a heated dispute involving several senior KPD officers, multiple county attorneys, the Police Commission and the mayor.
Until last Wednesday, KPD Assistant Chief Mark Begley had been on paid administrative leave since March 2012, when he filed a stress-based worker’s compensation claim, citing a hostile work environment, according to documents filed in a federal lawsuit Begley initiated in 2016 against the County of Kauai and KPD, also naming several senior KPD officers.
In that lawsuit, Begley claims that now-retired KPD Chief Darryl Perry and his successor, former Acting Chief Michael Contrades, harassed and retaliated against him for reporting allegations that another assistant chief acted inappropriately toward a subordinate female officer.
Begley was allowed to return to work roughly a month after his lawyers filed a motion asking the court to order the county to do so and only two days before a judge was set to rule on the matter.
The female police officer later settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but the dispute between Begley and Perry continued.
Eventually, then-Mayor Bernard Carvalho got involved and suspended Perry, who hired an attorney and eventually got a ruling from the Hawaii Supreme Court which found Carvalho had overstepped the bounds of his mayoral authority.
Around the time Perry’s case against the mayor and the county was being resolved, Begley filed his suit in federal court.
By that point, it was June 2016, five years after the internal KPD dispute had started.
Today, three years, a dozen attorneys, and thousands of pages of legal filings later, the case is nowhere near a conclusion.
Litigation in Begley’s lawsuit was put on hold earlier this month when attorneys acting on behalf of Perry and the county appealed a recent ruling in which the judge found Begley’s claims were solid enough to warrant a jury trial.
Begley’s attorney, Loretta Sheehan, said it could potentially take the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals years to hand down a decision on that appeal, at which point the lawyers would return to Begley’s lawsuit and attempt to either reach an agreement or proceed to trial.
What began in 2011 as a petty disagreement between coworkers has now cost county taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys fees alone — since March 2018, the County Council has approved $600,000 in expenditures related to the Begley case — and has tied up courtrooms in the state Judiciary for nearly a decade, with no foreseeable end in sight.
Perry may also be planning to take legal action against the county.
He filed a claim with the county clerk’s office last month, asking for $2 million in damages for what he described in his complaint as “a nine-year vendetta of continuous harassment” by Carvalho and others in his administration.
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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.
