CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Attorneys for Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot in killed Tamir Rice, filed a lawsuit Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court seeking to overturn an arbitrators decision to keep him off the force. The city is making a similar court challenge to an arbitrator’s decision that is expected to allow Alan Buford, who shot and killed 18-year-old Brandon Jones, to return to his old job.

Both cases went before arbitrators whose decisions are often the final word in such disputes. Both disputes would also require judges to find significant errors in the judgment of the arbitrators, and that is a legal long shot, according to labor and law experts interviewed by cleveland.com.

“The state and federal statutes favor upholding an arbitration decision,” longtime Cleveland labor attorney Bruce Elfvin said. “They all basically state that the arbitrator has the authority to decide the issues and that their decision is final. You’re not supposed to have anywhere else to go. So, there is finality on the decisions unless you can show the arbitrator went outside their authority in what they were trying to decide.”

The Loehmann Complaint

The Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, a union that represents rank-and-file police officers, on Monday filed its legal challenge in hopes that a judge will make the city reinstate Loehmann.

Arbitrator James Rimmel ruled in December that the city was allowed to fire the rookie officer. The city’s decision to fire Loehmann had nothing to do with Tamir’s death, but rather because the city accused him of lying on his police application.

The union and its attorneys made a number of claims in its complaint against Rimmel ruling.

The allege that Rimmel didn’t establish a clear burden of proof before the hearings started; they say he violated Loehmann’s due-process rights because the city did not initiate disciplinary hearings in time; they claim Rimmel used information not present in the collective bargaining agreement between the city and police union in rendering his decision; and that he exceeded his powers as an arbitrator.

Union attorneys Marisa Serat and Henry Hilow also say in their suit that the city violated policy because of political pressure to fire Loehmann after the shooting that brought national attention and weeks of protests.

“The (a)ward in this case violated fundamental fairness and further contradicted itself,” the filing says.

The city has not responded to request for comment on the challenge and has a history of declining to comment on pending litigation. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge John Russo was assigned the case.

The Buford Case

Cleveland is also challenging arbitrator Daniel Zieser’s decision to reverse Buford’s firing. He has yet to return to the force despite Zieser’s ruling that the city overstepped its authority in firing the veteran officer over the March 2015 shooting death of Jones.

A private attorney hired by the city argued that Buford lied in his account to internal affairs and in front of the arbitrator, and that forensic evidence clearly showed that Jones was in a crouching position when Buford fired and couldn’t have been attacking the officer as he claimed. The city’s attorney also argued that Buford lied about Jones reaching for his gun.

Zieser in an interview said that a challenge to an arbitrator’s ruling differs from typical lawsuits and appeals cases. There is usually no oral arguments in challenges to an arbitrator’s ruling. A common pleas judge typically decides the case based on court filings and a review of the arbitrator’s ruling.

The judge can only take a narrow look at the decision and can only overturn an arbitrator’s decision on four grounds, Zieser said.

Three of those grounds are difficult to prove and are rarely tested, Zieser said. A judge would have to find that an arbitrator was corrupt or fraudulent in reaching a decision, that the arbitrator was biased in making the decision or that there was misconduct during the hearing, such as an arbitrator refusing to hear some evidence.

Cleveland arbitrator David Schaefer said the fourth provision — that the arbitrator overstepped his or her authority in making a decision — is the most common argument used when attorneys try to overturn arbitration decisions.

That happens only when an arbitrator makes decisions outside the scope of the what the two sides are arguing.

Arbitration is set up to keep cases out of court system

Labor attorney Elfvin said judges are supposed to use extreme caution in overturning an arbitrator’s decision because the process is designed to keep complicated cases that could bog down a court’s docket out of the court system. He also said there’s an added layer of impartiality because both sides chose an arbitrator through a process of elimination.

“In a lot of respects, an arbitrator is more fair,” Elfvin said. “They’re more prone to look at both sides of the issues than a judge. Sometimes you have judges that are pro-employee or more pro-employer and they wear that on their sleeve. But for an arbitrator you won’t get many referrals if you start to be perceived as more partisan.”

Elfvin said as long as an arbitrator sticks with the focus of the arbitration, in the two Cleveland police cases the union and city’s collective bargaining agreement, then it would be difficult for a judge to overturn either decision.

“Most states, including Ohio, there is a strong policy favoring arbitration as opposed to the court system for complicated cases, and equally strong policy that the decision is final,” Schaefer said. “When a complicated case goes to arbitration, the idea is that you’re done. That’s pretty much the same way throughout the country and that’s why so few of the awards get overturned.”