‘There’s no evidence’: Boise State officials request retrial in Big City Coffee case
The two Boise State University administrators ordered to pay millions in damages after losing a lawsuit brought by Big City Coffee are asking for a new trial.
Keely Duke, the attorney for the officials, said at a post-trial hearing Monday afternoon that “there’s no evidence” to support the verdict the jury delivered. She urged the court to reject it.
“The verdict issued by the jury should not stand,” Duke said in front of 4th District Judge Cynthia Yee-Wallace. “There was not substantial or competent evidence presented at trial that would support a finding of any type of termination of the contract.”
The jury of a dozen Ada County residents sided with Big City owner Sarah Fendley after a three-week trial that ended Sept. 13. The panel decided unanimously that Leslie Webb, the university’s former vice president of student affairs, and Alicia Estey, Boise State’s vice president for university affairs at the time, owed Fendley $4 million in damages for ending the school’s deal that brought a Big City cafe to campus.
Jurors awarded $3 million for business losses, mental and emotional distress, personal humiliation and lost reputation, the Idaho Statesman previously reported, and tacked on an extra $1 million in punitive damages against Webb, who now works at the University of Montana. Punitive damages are punishment for behavior found to be especially harmful.
Estey still works at Boise State but has since been promoted to chief financial and operating officer.
Fendley’s attorney, Michael Roe, argued during the trial that the administrators forced Fendley to close her campus shop just a couple of months after it opened in 2020 to appease a group of students who disliked her support of law enforcement and displays of thin blue line items. Fendley had a thin blue line sticker posted to the door of her downtown location and was vocal about her support of police on social media.
The dispute began when a Boise State student posted to a private Snapchat story about Big City’s support of law enforcement and asked friends to boycott the campus store.
Fendley, who was sent a screenshot of the post, addressed it in on Facebook, causing a “firestorm” that spurred a meeting with the two Boise State officials. At that meeting, which was partially recorded by Estey, Fendley asked Boise State to use its code of conduct to suppress students who disagreed with her; when the administrators declined, she threatened to “take her resources downtown and do better” if she didn’t feel supported, the recording showed.
The last 20 minutes or so of the meeting were not recorded, however, and the sides dispute what happened then.
Duke said during trial that the school had a duty not to take sides or suppress free speech, and maintained that it wasn’t Boise State that had severed the contract. On Monday, she argued that the damages awarded by the jury were “excessive” and “against the law.”
She also asserted that the jury failed to follow the court’s instructions.
Roe, who spoke after Duke, noted that the jury listened to nine days of testimony and “didn’t believe her clients, and it didn’t believe her witnesses.”
“Now Ms. Duke’s going to come in here today and ask you to take the case away from the jury, to substitute your impression, weighing of the evidence and assessment of credibility,” Roe said before Yee-Wallace. “That’s not appropriate.”
Kersti Kennedy, another attorney for Fendley, said that there’s no evidence a new trial would result in a new verdict and that the court should defer to the jury’s decision.
Yee-Wallace did not say when she would rule on the motion to hold a new trial. Another hearing in the case is scheduled for Jan. 6 on a separate set of motions, including a request from the defense to delay payment of the $4 million verdict pending appeals.
Thin blue line and timing
The idea of police as a thin blue line is a century old, the Statesman previously reported, but thin blue line flags weren’t created until 2014, by a college student motivated by protests against three police killings that year, including the shootings of a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland and 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. All of the victims were Black.
The flags rose in popularity when the U.S. saw growing calls for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020. Floyd, a Black man, was killed by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” captured on video, sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the country for months and raised discussions about police brutality and issues of race.
Several such protests took place in Boise, and were marked by counterprotests and a wealth of tension.
That summer was when Fendley was first approached about having a coffee shop at Boise State, and she opened the store on Sept. 4, 2020. Fendley’s attorneys argued at trial that the university was well aware of her pro-police stances before Big City debuted on campus.
Big City Coffee closed temporarily at the end of August, citing construction on Grove Street downtown, but in early September the cafe shuttered for good, with Fendley noting on the Big City website that her “heart is broken” but that she was “filled with the messages and calls of love and support.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 6:06 PM.
