East St. Louis Mayor Charles Powell III
EAST ST. LOUIS — A federal judge has awarded a default judgment to two government workers who accused the city of illegally firing them in retaliation for allegedly revealing alleged misconduct in the housing authority.
The judge said the default judgment was needed to punish East St. Louis' city government for what he said was a "repeated and willful disregard" of the court's orders in the case.
Nicholas and Shonte Mueller, a married couple, have been embroiled in litigation with East. St. Louis for years. Nicholas served as assistant police chief, while Shonte was a housing authority commissioner. Their wrongful termination lawsuit targeted the city, its housing authority and an agent, Michael Collins, as well as East St. Louis Mayor Charles Powell III, City Council members Courtney Hoffman II and LaVondo Pulley and City Manager Robert Betts.
The Muellers claim Shonte lost her job after reporting the housing authority wasn’t complying with federal laws and said Nicholas also was fired on the same grounds. They also say the government defendants — specifically the city and Betts — repeatedly missed discovery deadlines and extensions or provided inadequate responses.
In an opinion filed April 6, U.S. District Judge David Dugan said a joint discovery report filed 364 days earlier included the Muellers’ allegation of “wholly inadequate responses consisting of only Nicholas Mueller’s personnel file and a single blanket objection refusing to answer any discovery directed to Shonte Mueller. The report further detailed that, during conference calls, defense counsel admitted he had been unable to obtain responses from his client despite repeated attempts, and specifically disclosed on April 4, 2025, that no internal correspondence, emails, or communications had been reviewed or collected for production, and the city intended to object to all of Shonte Mueller’s discovery requests on the ground that she was not a city employee.”
When the government responded to the Muellers’ motion to compel discovery, it claimed the couple was just dissatisfied with the answers and said the city had no legal power over the housing authority. In May, Dugan ruled those and other responses were largely “without basis, evasive, incomplete and/or nonresponsive.” Even though he ordered more responses and documents within two weeks, “Defendants produced virtually nothing responsive to the document requests, resulting in plaintiffs to submitting a second joint discovery report.”
Dugan detailed further issues, including ongoing failure to produce records “critical for damages calculations” and a Betts deposition at which “he admitted under oath that he had never searched his email or phone for responsive communications and that no one had asked him to do so.”
Ultimately the Muellers opted against filing a second motion to compel but did seek compensation for their legal fees. In February Dugan issued another order demanding certain documents along with more than $3,000 in legal fees, a $100 daily “coercive sanction for noncompliance” and the warning “that any failure to comply would result in the court ordering defendants, at their sole expense, to retain a neutral forensic vendor to image the relevant devices and email systems and collect responsive material.”
The city and Betts didn’t respond to that order, Dugan said, prompting the Muellers to request sanctions. In a March 24 filing the defendants showed they paid the legal fees, supplemented responses to earlier information production requests “and agreed upon a forensic service provider to be engaged if the court orders imaging, explained that payroll records prior to 2023 were purged by the city’s third-party administrator (of which the city was unaware), and noted that Nicholas Mueller’s pension records are maintained by the East St. Louis Police Pension Fund rather than the city.”
Betts and the city said their conduct, albeit difficult, wasn’t willful or in bad faith and asked Dugan to deny the sanctions request. In response, the Muellers said the government still owes them an additional $7,771 in fees and challenged the claim of agreeing on a forensic service firm.
“The record establishes by a preponderance of the evidence,” Dugan wrote, that the city and Betts “engaged in willful, bad-faith, and contumacious noncompliance with two successive court orders spanning nearly 10 months.”
He agreed with the Muellers that the government only paid some of the legal fees four days after they moved for sanctions and said any activity on the government’s part doesn’t represent a “good-faith bureaucratic delay; it is the type of flagrant bad faith and willful noncompliance that justifies default judgment.” He further said a “reliance on internal municipal bureaucracy, such as the need for successive City Council agendas and approvals, is insufficient to avoid sanctions.”
Any obstacles, such as the payroll administrator’s data purge, “could and should have been discovered and communicated” but were instead ignored for almost an entire year. Although the government did offer some records, Dugan said, “partial or belated compliance does not cure months of defiance.”
A trial had been set for August, but the Muellers are unable to adequately prepare without the necessary information, the judge said. Further, Dugan noted, the daily sanction tab now exceeds $3,000, which he said demonstrates financial penalties aren’t a powerful enough tool to coerce compliance.
“Defendants have now demonstrated, through repeated and willful disregard of explicit court orders, deadlines, accumulating daily fines, and the threat of forensic imaging, that no sanction short of default judgment will vindicate the Court’s authority or restore the integrity of the discovery process,” Dugan wrote. “Default judgment is the proportionate, necessary, and just response.”
He ordered Betts and the city to hire a forensic vendor within a week and gave that contractor two weeks to produce information for the Muellers, gave the defendants three weeks to pay the accrued daily penalty and two weeks to pay the remaining legal fees. He said a damages calculation for the underlying litigation will happen when appropriate.
Betts and the city are represented by Alvin C. Paulson and Grey R. Chatham Jr.
