KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A federal judge has awarded more than $344,000 in legal fees to a former prisoner who sued the Justice Department seeking answers about a 1988 explosion that killed six Kansas City firefighters, for which he spent nearly 20 years in prison.
Bryan Sheppard, who maintains his innocence in the explosion, filed the lawsuit after his release in 2017. He petitioned under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking the disclosure of records stemming from a federal review prompted by a Kansas City Star investigation that raised questions about whether federal investigators engaged in misconduct.
"This case is not about whether the Star's allegations are indeed true or whether the five individuals convicted of the 1988 arson are actually innocent," Sheppard's attorneys wrote in the lawsuit, filed in the Western District of Missouri in December 2017. "Instead, it is about whether a federal government agency reviewing the actions of its own investigators and prosecutors, should be allowed to conclude unilaterally, without any public review or accountability, that the agency and its personnel have done nothing wrong."
