Many interesting people and cases in Santa Monica
Santa Monica’s downtrodden, picked-on and poor have a new ally in town.
Paul Mills, an attorney who works out of a mid-Wilshire office and lives in a West Los Angeles apartment, is representing three, high-profile civil rights cases against the city.
“First Amendment cases traditionally attract interesting people,” he said. “And there just happen to be a lot of interesting people in Santa Monica.”
Mills successfully negotiated with the city to drop seven of eight misdemeanor charges against Henna artist Luke Chanthadara for operating a business without a city permit on the Third Street Promenade.
Chanthadara had racked up the citations because, in protest, he continued to practice Henna after the city council forbid it from public streets in November 2001.
Mills also has taken the case of Stewart Lamle, a local game inventor, who is facing multiple charges of operating a business on the Promenade without a license. Unlike Chanthadara, Lamle’s case seems destined to go to a jury trial. Acourt date will likely be scheduled next month.
Lamle argues the city is unjustly picking on him because he has successfully defeated 38 misdemeanor citations for not having a street performer’s permit. He says it’s his constitutional right to peddle his game on the Promenade.
And Mills has taken up David Busch’s lawsuit against the city, which also is likely go to trial. Currently attorneys on both sides of the case are in the discovery phase of the proceedings, when lawyers gather evidence to support their case.
Busch is suing Santa Monica because he feels the city’s anti-camping laws are used as a quasi no-loitering ordinance, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.
Mills, who grew up on the East Coast, attended Columbia University before heading to UCLA Law School, where he graduated in 1995.
So far, he is representing most of his Santa Monica clientele for free, or a minimal charge.
Mills said he isn’t practicing First Amendment law for the big bucks.
He drives an old gray, beat-up Japanese import with an odometer that has likely spun around more than a Las Vegas slot machine. A sole bumper sticker on the back displays a waving American flag with the phase “God Bless America.”
His suits are not the designer fare commonly found in the high-profile Santa Monica Courthouse. And sometimes the color of his socks are visible through a hole in the toe of his dress shoes.
“All I know is these people got stepped on and they’ve ended up in court with me as their lawyer,” he said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 7, 2002. Read the original PDF.