Late Tuesday, a federal magistrate released testimony by Bernard B. Kerik and a former girlfriend in an employment discrimination case, one of the legal tangles from his years as a senior aide to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani that surfaced while his nomination as secretary of homeland security was collapsing. For the Bloomberg administration, the case was just one more in an unusual collection of city lawsuits that grind along, regardless of national politics: dealing with the civil rights damages people claim to have suffered at the hands of Mr. Giuliani or his senior aides.
In the three years since Michael R. Bloomberg succeeded Mr. Giuliani, the city has spent close to $2 million to settle lawsuits brought by residents and city workers who accused the Giuliani administration of retaliating against them for exercising free speech or other constitutional rights.
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While the city is sued more than 20,000 times a year, cases have been rarely brought in which a mayor - or top City Hall aides - are accused of personally harming an individual. Even more rarely have they succeeded. Under Mr. Giuliani, the city paid $2 million in 1994 to settle claims by a group of white executives at the Off-Track Betting Corporation, who had accused Hazel Dukes, the president of the corporation appointed by Mayor David N. Dinkins, of discriminating against them; she had claimed that they were incompetent.
Prior to Mr. Giuliani, perhaps the most prominent example involved a lawsuit arising from the Crown Heights riots of 1991. A group of Hasidic residents and organizations charged that Mr. Dinkins and the police commissioner, Lee Brown, ordered police to permit the violence. After statements from 15 high-ranking police officers yielded no evidence of such an order, that portion of the claim was dropped.
The early stages of several cases from the Giuliani era, however, produced very different results, uncovering evidence that might have proved embarrassing at trial if the city had not settled.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/nyregion/24costs.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
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