Though he’s lived in Houston the past 20 years, Southwest Louisiana native Seth Hopkins said “his area code will always be 337 — in good times and bad.”
“That’s because we’re a community of smart, tough, honest people with unmatched resilience and, most importantly, stubbornness,” he said. “That can be a good thing sometimes.”
Hopkins — now a member of the Senior Leadership Team at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, the nation’s third-largest county attorney’s office — said that stubbornness is what led to him prevailing in the longest single-client Title II Americans with Disabilities Act case in history. The case, Covington v McNeese, ultimately lasted 12 years and led to Hopkins arguing three times to the Louisiana Supreme Court. It also resulted in the university being ordered to correct 15,000 ADA violations at a cost of nearly $14 million.
“The case that I’m most proud of that I ever worked on was right here in Lake Charles,” Hopkins told members of the Kiwanis Club of Lake Charles this week. “It was right after I got my license and it was a case, unfortunately, against McNeese. I went to McNeese, I love McNeese, I was part of the Governor’s Program and was the editor of the Contraband (student newspaper). The cast lingered 12 and a half years and it was over something that was simple — a bathroom door.”
Hopkins’ client and friend, Collette Covington, enrolled at McNeese in the 1990s — and was the first person in her family to attend college. After her first three semesters, she had a 3.6 grade-point average, wrote for the student newspaper, yearbook and campus photography office, and served in the student senate and as a McNeese ambassador. During this time, Covington also founded the Students Offering Support organization to help those on campus with disabilities.
“She was ambulatory at the time and she starts this organization when she saw people in wheelchairs having trouble getting access to campus facilities,” Hopkins said. “S.O.S. would do things such hold fundraisers, car washes, they’d get $200 and they’d give it to McNeese and say, ‘Can you use this to upgrade something?’ and McNeese would do it.”
During her senior year in 1996, Covington became confined to a wheelchair after she fell into a hole and injured her knee on campus. Collette had repeated surgeries, began having frequent seizures and her health deteriorated. She had to withdraw from school for a few semesters, but ultimately returned in hopes of finishing her degree.
“Going to college was very important to her. She grew up in Breaux Bridge and nobody in her family had been to college before,” Hopkins said. “It was vital to her that she be able to attend McNeese and pass.”
Hopkins said Covington called McNeese before each semester began to ask if they could move her classes scheduled on the second floor to first-floor classrooms.
“They would say, ‘No. You’re nobody special. That is where the class is held” Hopkins said. “She had a routine. She would take out her student loans, she would go on campus, she would navigate to a building. She went to Farrar Hall and there was a wheelchair ramp but the door it led to was always locked. She would sit there in the cold and the rain in January on top of that ramp, hoping somebody would see her, go around, go to the top of the stairs and let her in.”
But when she finally was able to get inside, that doorway was blocked with furniture.
“Then the elevators were broken,” Hopkins said. “And she had a professor who said, ‘You will never get more than a C in my class because you can’t get to the lab.’ That was absolutely Day 1 what she had to deal with.”
Hopkins said Covington couldn’t drop out because all of her student loans would be due.
“She had to withdraw from 92 hours in those four years, her GPA dropped down to a 2.7 and then finally on Jan. 31, 2001, she reached her breaking point,” Hopkins said. “She went into the Old Ranch and tried to go to the bathroom but she couldn’t get into the stall and she peed on herself — which she was doing frequently on campus. Then as she was coming out, she went to open the door, which required three times per pound to open since she was in a wheelchair, it was too narrow and she ended up hurting her rotator cuff. She got fed up and she called me.”
Hopkins initially told her he wouldn’t take the case.
“I said, ‘Collette, I am not taking on McNeese.They have a fire marshal who says they’re compliant, they have signs up that says they’re compliant, an ADA compliance guy who says they’re compliant and the zoning and planning department says they’re compliant.’ I asked her why she thought she knew better than them and she said, ‘Seth, just measure the stall.”
Hopkins said he fired a consultant from Houston who came in and he said, ‘This is bad.”
He said he spent months trying not to file the lawsuit, speaking with then-President Robert Hebert to try and get the bathroom fixed.
“I told him my expert says it’ll cost $4,000 to upgrade this bathroom. I will donate it to McNeese and we can make this lawsuit go away,” Hopkins said. “And the answer was, ‘No. It’s the principle of it. If we fix one bathroom more will come.’ That was the line in the sand.”
Hopkins said from there, it got messy.
“McNeese spent the first few years of the case arguing that Collette was not disabled, that she convinced doctors to perform unnecessary surgeries on her and get Social Security and was faking her injuries to file this lawsuit,” Hopkins said. “The judge, who was also in a wheelchair, asked them, ‘Do you think Miss Covington is riding in a wheelchair for sport?’ Then they said she didn’t need compliant bathrooms because the ADA does not protect her right to urinate.”
Hopkins said as the case continued, things just got worse.
“Dr. Hebert, who I have great respect for, just never understood this and maybe received bad advice. In his deposition he testified that he questions whether it is ‘fundamentally important’ for those with disabilities to ‘obtain an education.’ He said it ‘wasn’t a high priority.’ What really made us sad was McNeese actually had the money to fix this. It had casino funds that no other university had, it’s operating budget doubled in less than a decade even though student enrollment stayed flat and it had $1.1 million in surplus ADA funds that it wouldn’t spend ‘on principal.’ ”
Ultimately, Covington won her case.
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal, in denying McNeese’s appeal, concluded that McNeese’s basis “was not only meritless, but its arguments were sanctionable, frivolous, completely irrational, indefensible.”
“We cannot fathom that McNeese felt no need, regardless of what is required by law, to operate a single women’s restroom in to ADA compliance in a building that houses two of the main student cafeterias on campus, offices for student government activities, and a state-of-the-art computer laboratory. McNeese’s decision is reminiscent of the intolerances of the past,” the ruling concluded.
The justices wrote McNeese was “bold enough to bring such a case to the appellate court where a published written opinion will forever memorialize its discrimination.”
That opinion garnered more attention. The case prompted a U.S. Department of Justice civil rights investigation, a $13.8 million injunction to correct 15,000 violations on McNeese’s 1.3 million-square-foot campus, systemic changes at eight public universities and national media coverage.
In 2010, McNeese gave Covington a scholarship. She finished her undergraduate degree — which took seven years to get — and earned two master’s degrees. She then became a special education teacher.
But the case didn’t end there. For the next three years, Hopkins fought to be awarded attorney fees. He had spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars working on this case without pay.
McNeese refused to concede that he was entitled to anything for his work. It put him on trial for six days. McNeese’s lawyers called him “slow,” “greedy,” and unethical, blamed him for undermining the public’s confidence in the law, and accused him of “fraud,” “shenanigans,” “propaganda,” and “misconduct.” McNeese called him a “pretty please” lawyer for extending professional courtesies and claimed he was incompetent, “obsessive,” dishonest, had imaginary friends, committed a “felony,” and should be “disbarred.”
In awarding $1.5 million in fees to Hopkins and his team, the appellate court referred to “young Hopkins ” as “eloquent,” “truly devoted,” “gallant,” and presenting “a well-orchestrated case worthy of emulation by the most seasoned attorneys” for his “superior performance” in a “rare and exceptional” case.
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