Greed (Surprise) Behind Lawsuit Against Hawai’i School
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin today reported on an attorney’s disclosure of the monetary amount of a settlement reached between Kamehameha Schools and a plaintiff to end a lawsuit filed by a teenage John Doe, claiming the school violated his civil rights because he was not of Hawaiian descent.
The alleged amount of the settlement — and there is no way to verify the amount due to the confidentiality agreement in place from the settlement — makes it even more clear to me that the plaintiffs and his attorneys in this case were motivated more by greed than by civil rights. The Star-Bulletin article cites attorney John Goemans’s belief that he was not paid enough:
Goemans said Grant received 40 percent, or $2.8 million of the $7 million. Goemans said he is preparing to file his own lawsuit seeking to recover a “reasonable percentage” of the $7 million for his work in the case.
Goemans said he found the unnamed student and arranged for Grant to be the attorney for the student and his mother.
“I put the whole thing together,” Goemans said. “But for me there would not have been a $7 million payment.”
Kamehameha Schools, a private school in Honolulu, maintains an admissions policy that promotes restorative justice for Native Hawaiians, an indigenous people whose culture, property and self-governance were nearly destroyed by 19th and 20th century colonialism.
I was born and raised in Hawai’i and not of Hawaiian descent. Kamehameha Schools was founded and is funded by a trust created from private funds and has a noble and needed mission to educate children of Native Hawaiian descent. It’s deplorable that the lawsuit was even filed in the first place, disgusting that right-wing attorneys and judges allowed the case to proceed and unfortunate that the Schools has to continue to fight for the rights of its current and future students.
