After 15 Disciplinary Actions, Is Robert Slameka a Bad or Good Lawyer?

Reporter Joe Swickard at the Detroit Free Press has this profile of Detroit attorney Robert Slamka, the subject of much official and unofficial scrutiny.   Somehow despite 15 separate disciplinary actions resulting in admonishments and reprimands, but he has never been suspended and the Courts keep referring cases to him for representation of indigent locals. Here's an excerpt from Swickard's story:

Attorney Robert Slameka (pic) has amassed quite a record: He has been admonished 11 times, reprimanded four times and had a client's conviction overturned because of his poor performance.

And the record could get worse: The state's Attorney Grievance Commission is prosecuting him on charges that he improperly revealed a client's purported confession when the man tried to back out of a plea deal in 2007.  He was tried on those charges in May and written arguments are due this month. There is no timetable for a decision. If he is found in violation of professional rules, Slameka could be reprimanded again or have his license suspended.

Slameka's 42-year legal record stands out among Michigan lawyers. A review of Attorney Disciplinary Board records shows only four other lawyers in the state have been reprimanded as many times as Slameka, but three of them also have been suspended.

"Its inexplicable how (Slameka) has avoided having his license suspended," said Larry Dubin, a University of Detroit Mercy law professor and ethics expert who helped set up the state's system for policing attorneys.

Slameka repeatedly declined to speak to the Free Press about his past troubles, the current complaint -- which he briefly described as "political in nature;" retribution for a more than two-decade-old murder case -- or the impact of a 2009 National Public Radio report that made him the face of bad court-appointed lawyers: "A lot of lawyers in Detroit say if you want to see what's wrong with this country's public defender system, just take a look at Bob Slameka: He has gotten into trouble a lot during his 40 years as a public defender, but the county still appoints him to cases."

Slameka's lawyer, Thomas Loeb, said that "four reprimands in 42 years of practice doesn't trouble me at all."

He added that two reprimands dealing with clients' fees probably wouldn't be problematic under recent court rulings. Loeb said Slameka is a solid attorney often dealing with difficult clients in serious trouble.  "He's a good guy," Loeb said. "He knows (criminal) court as well as anyone else." [ . . . ]
A private attorney, Slameka remains on Wayne County's list of lawyers eligible to be appointed to represent indigent clients because the sheer amount of cases moving through the county's criminal justice system far outpaces the number of public defenders, and each defendant is entitled to counsel.

The standards aren't stringent. To be on the list, a lawyer has to be a member in good standing of the state bar and Wayne County criminal bar associations, attend ongoing education programs and have an office in Wayne County, said the county's Presiding Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny. [ . . . ]
Attorney Grievance Administrator Robert Agacinski chalked up part of Slameka's woes to his caseload and longevity, saying a busy criminal defense lawyer can get many complaints from unhappy convicted clients. And recently retired Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Augustus Hutting stuck up for Slameka: "He's straight to his word. In 15 years, I've never had a problem with Bob."

Hutting said Slameka can size up a case quickly and cut a realistic deal when necessary. The brusqueness, he said, may seem insensitive or cold to someone expecting a table-thumping shouter. But Hutting said he has never seen Slameka act contrary to his client's interests.
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The real question is whether Slameka's clients receive adequate representation and whether those who are convicted can automatically claim ineffective assistance of counsel based on this track record.  You see the problem?

Will Currying Favor with Big Ten Coach Cost Columbus Lawyer his Law License?

One of the unexpected aspects of the Ohio State Scandal is the role played by Christopher Cicero (pic, left), a Columbus-area attonrey who totally-breached client confidentiality to inform Big Ten Ohio State Coach Jim Tressel about Buckeyes selling memorabilia to a tattoo parlor/drug dealer client.  Here's a link to the certified complaint filed against Cicero with details from Cicero's email communications with Tressel.  

According to the complaint, Christopher T. Cicero violated codes of professional conflict when he sent three e-mails to Tressel about players giving football memorabilia in exchange for free or discounted tattoos, a violation of attorney-client privilege and confidentiality.   Cicero learned of the information from conversations with Edward Rife, who owns the Columbus tattoo parlor and was the subject of a federal drug-trafficking investigation.  Rife asked for confidentiality as part of an intake interview on the criminal case pending against Rife and his Tattoo Parlour.  Cicero promptly turned around and sent unsolicited emails to Tressel which are quoted at length in the complaint. 
If true, really a disgusting performance by a lawyer trying to suck up to Coach Tressel.

This Week on Bad Lawyer

An anonymous comment left at the Bad Lawyer post relating to Douglas Robinson, the Cincy drug addict arrested 74 times in two years-- made me think that the commentator was reading my mind. 

The Bad Lawyer Blawg was actually created as a forum to enable a Bad Lawyer to get some sleep and deal with intrusive dreams in the wake of cascading professional disaster.  This is my struggle to objectively look at who I am and what I became, and document the past and present.

The frenzied legal commentary that ensued since August, particularly in the month of January is nothing but self portraiture--the Bad Lawyer is a little bit of somebody or someone in all the stories that I've cast my focus on especially those tales of lawyers and judges gone horrible wrong.  There is a tremendous poignancy for me in relating the stories of lawyers marched into court to plead in disgrace to charges of schemes and scams even in the case  the POS lawyer who goes to jail after stealing from widower's estates to give his girlfriend breast enhancements.  I feel pain in a sharp pain in my gut, because, I see the criminal under my own hat in these stories.  The Bad Lawyer's outrage at guns and tasers, police and public officials, child molesters and the church,  tells me that beneath my own corruption and denial there beats the heart of the young guy who wanted to be a good lawyer. 

But the anonymous comment caught something that I recognize and which I alluded to the other day that in order to find even a penitent's path back to my profession this Blawg can not continue at the pace and with the focus of this last month.   It will change and while I intend to keep drawing on the news stories that interest me and motivate me as a human being and as a lawyer, this week and for the foreseeable future I begin to cope daily with the struggle to begin to put it back together, professionally.  I don't know what the future holds, further humiliation and disaster are possible if not probable--but, this blawg will narrate it all.

I will post at greater length, about the agonies of this Saturday and the scramble to timely comply with requirements set out in a letter the Supremes sent me on December 29, which I did not open until Saturday, mistakenly believing it to be a "hard copy" of what was published online.   In fact the letter the Supremes sent was a multi-page set of instructions and prohibitions upon me that layered on further humiliations and retrictions.  Amazingly, a little piece of paper fluttered out of the envelope which said in effect if you want to know what we said in our opinion finding you a Bad Lawyer log on to our website:  http://www.youareapieceofshit.com/ and read it for yourself.  Consequently, Saturday was a further nadir in my psychological and emotional life.  By Sunday I felt like a piece of fruit that had been pummeled by one of those Louisville Slugger Baseball Bats--this, after I saw some sort of light ahead. 

There is a great saying among spiritual seekers that resonates with me, on the path to enlightment when you are approached by someone claiing to be the Buddha, kill the Buddha, because the first person you meet claiming to be the Buddha is always a "false Buddha."  The guy in my mirror in the morning, who thought he saw some light, was a false Buddha.   So I begin again.

Last week, I met with my accountant and a bankruptcy attorney to explore my/those options.  That was a good meeting, in the sense that for now at least I was able to exclude an easy way out of the abyss.  Sometimes, the abyss is so deep that there is no exit;  it is possible, the abyss is so deep that it works to your advantage--just a possibility, not a probability.  This week, I plan to labor in the coal mines of my tattered financial records and rummage through the bankers boxes of canceled checks tyring to bring myself in compliance with filing requirements that everyone else in America seems capable of dealing with, but that I have spectacularly failed to attend to at my very real peril.  So this will be a quiet week on the Bad Lawyer Blawg.  While I already have some posts written and "scheduled" I will see what I have left over in terms of energy or the ability to focus--to add to the portrait of the Bad Lawyer.

That is after all what this Blawg is--it is a self portrait of the Bad Lawyer. 

Lawyer Schemes and Scams

Wow!  Here's a scheme, scam, scandal:  the Bad Lawyers in the pic are a couple of North Carolina lawyers who designed and executed a scam to obtain DWI dismissals for essentially no good reason.  While earning nothing to speak of and ensnaring many others in their scam, attorneys Chad Lee (pic entering court with his father and lawyer and Lee Hatch have "baffled" the sentencing Judge who sent them to prison.  This story is from the North Carolina News and Observer.com: 

"Chad Lee and Lee Hatch, buddies for more than a decade, headed to prison for nearly four years. They were spared the 50 years their crimes could have brought them; both surrendered their law licenses. Jack McLamb and Vann Sauls will be forbidden to take criminal cases as they serve three years of probation. Portia Snead, a deputy Superior Court clerk who helped with the scam, lost her job and retirement pay; she, too, is on probation. Cindy Jaeger, a former prosecutor at the center of the plot, still faces charges. The pleas help close an investigation that rocked the Johnston County legal community. Prosecutors say that, with Jaeger's help, the lawyers and the clerk wiped away drunken driving charges for dozens of defendants. Court documents were treated like currency, traded after hours among friends, filed in daylight under the auspices of official court business. 

'I cannot understand why anyone thought this was a good idea,' Superior Court Judge Henry Hight said moments before sentencing Lee. 'Detection was almost certain given the [pathetic condition of the] records and the number of people involved. I don't get it.'"
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It is a mistake, to presume that lawyers are smart or competent.  Everyday I have to dispell this notion, I try to start with the guy in the mirror.

Utah Lawyer Steals from the Dead, Gives Girlfriend Big TaTas!

This piece-of-shit (also called, "POS"--a technical expression) is Matthew "Terry" Graff.  He was a Cedar City, Utah lawyer until he got all grabby with the clients' settlement money.  Lot's of it.  Nothing new there, but it's from who he took money that caught my attention, and it is what he did with the money;  the account that follows is from Mark Havnes, Salt Lake Tribune article:

"Charges were filed against Graff in May 2009, after investigators said he stole money from Matthew Tillery and Easton Vigil. The money was from settlements the men received from the company that owned the airplane in which their wives died.   Marci Tillery and Camie Vigil were among nine employees of the Southwest Skin and Cancer Clinic in Cedar City who were killed in an Aug. 22, 2008 plane crash as they returned from a work trip to Moab. The pilot also died.  All the families received out-of-court settlements from The Leavitt Agency. But Tillery and Vigil, who retained Graff to represent them, never got their money.

Investigators said Graff used the money to pay for a house in St. George for his girlfriend, pay for her breast augmentation, and take her on a trip to Hawaii, among other things. He also spent $10,000 of the money he stole on a birthday party in Las Vegas for his wife.

'He didn't care for us, he just wanted a big paycheck,' Tillery said during Friday's hearing. 'He pretended to be a savior at the darkest time of my life. What he did has made me angry and frustrated.'

Vigil did not testify, but others who have been swindled by Graff did.   After Graff was charged last year, police and attorneys for Iron and Washington counties received more than 100 complaints about him, the Cedar City courtroom was packed Friday with people who claimed to be his victims. Many were elderly. All were angry."
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It's especially reassuring to know that our nation's law schools are pumping thousands of these men and women out on an unsuspecting public--most without a means of support, or a clue as to how to pay the bills, etc.

Shut Up, Go to Jail!

Michael Sneed (pic) is a Tennessee lawyer who just can't return a phone call or stop practicing law even when ordered to--so he's going to jail.  This is from the Tennessean.com: 

"A Nashville attorney has been disbarred and ordered to serve jail time over contempt charges and several allegations that he mistreated clients.  The Tennessee Supreme Court disbarred Michael Sneed for numerous ethical violations and ordered him to serve 50 days in jail for criminal contempt because he disobeyed a court order to stop practicing law after a suspension last year.  Sneed, reached by phone Tuesday, said he didn't believe the complaints against him had any merit and he plans to proceed with a federal suit that says he was improperly suspended and his constitutional rights were violated.

Sneed said he had not seen the order.

'I will admit, I made mistakes,' Sneed said. 'I had a large number of clients I represented … I'm not saying I was not an effective attorney. I think I did a good job for 99 percent of the people I represented.'

A disciplinary panel recommended in 2008 that Sneed be disbarred after clients and other attorneys complained that he acted unethically or failed to keep his clients informed. He was suspended the next year. The court found that he continued to practice law, and in an order issued Tuesday, the state Supreme Court put in place a sentence of 50 days jail time for 50 counts of criminal contempt related to his law practice. Sneed had already been disciplined by the Board of Professional Responsibility — the panel that disciplines lawyers — eight times by 2002, and five newer complaints for failing to communicate or keep accurate financial records for clients led to his suspension early last year." 

The article really focuses in on what seems to be a pretty cut and dried case of a lawyer who loved to be in court, but hated every other aspect of practicing law.  Sneed hated talking to his clients, and he was notorious as so many lawyers are--at returning phone calls (a subject I plan to return to in the near future.)  Apparently, Sneed can now begin his jailhouse practice. 
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When your disciplinary authorities tell you to stop practicing law--um, stop practicing law. 

Ex-Con Ex-Lawyer Just Keeps On Stealing

George Young, III (mugshot) is a disbarred lawyer out of Delaware County, Maryland.  Young stole some $109,000 from a trust account he maintained for disabled veterans and went to prison for the dirty deed.  Now out of jail he went back to the well, he located former clients and surreptiously filed new claims and stole another boatload of money from these vets according to a report at Philly.com.

There are endless variations of bad guy in the world, for your edification I give you the compulsive crook.

Ex-husband: Nevada Barr is a Lying Whore--So What?

Nevada Barr the best-selling author, lied under oath about an affair she had with her current husband during a Mississippi divorce proceedings in 2005.  While the perjury came to light during that divorce, her ex-husband is still getting his "pound of flesh" (more on that concept later) and the Mississippi Supreme Court has now instructed (link is to the Mississippi Supreme Court Opinion) the Chancery Court of Hinds County, Mississippi to whack-her-one-good as a sanction for perjury. 

The proceeding in Mississippi is as gothic as you get, turning on a "Dear John" letter Barr penned on a personal computer she subsequently destroyed, dismembered, and disposed of in a Bayou according to a report in the Mississippi Clarion Ledger.  By the way, this is a highly dramatic story covered in sensational detail by Jimmie E. Gates at the Clarion-Ledger website.

Nevada Barr is going to get an expensive legal smack for lying under oath and for destroying evidence.  She may go to jail if the Chancery Court decides to refer the matter for criminal prosecution.  Is any of this fair?  Probabaly not.  Oh, don't let me go all Bad Lawyer on you, but why is her "affair" relevant to the division of property decision in a divorce court?  Her extra marital affair while it may go to her "character" or lack thereof, is hardly relevant to a division of property which is all the proceeding in Chancery Court was about.  In fact the Mississippi Supreme Court confirmed the property division decision that the Chancery Court made at the time.   Her ex-husband, who certainly deserves to feel hurt and wounded by the betrayal doesn't have the right to compel an inquirey about non-material matters, to wit:  my wife is a lying whore, punish her.  That's all this is about.

Perjury is by definition, a false statement of fact or assertion that goes to a "material issue" in the case.  This is why Bill Clinton was not prosecuted.   Clinton's lie "about that girl" spoke volumes about his character, but was not perjury.  Well, the boys down in Mississippi see it a little differently, and Nevada Barr is going to pay and keep on paying.  As someone labled a "liar" by the OurState Supreme Court in the opinion that confirmed my status as a Bad Lawyer, I acutely feel the pain.

You Must Go Bust

A friend sent me an item from the Toledo Blade about a Toledo-area lawyer who filed for personal bankruptcy protection.  The Toledo Blade reports "Attorney goes bust after losing suit."

Get this, the suit was 18 years ago.  The Judge in the case--long dead.  So why was this bankruptcy of interest to the Blade?

It turns out that the "suit" lost 18 years earlier (by this bankrupt attorney), was a libel action against the Blade, and the Blade has a long memory.

Now granted this lawyer appears not to have been the sharpest knife in the drawer.  In the lawsuit that our bankrupt lawyer lost 18 years ago, the County Judge said that Mr George C. Rogers (the attorney who went bust) and his co-counsel were "lazy, shabby, [and] inexcusably negligent."  the Judge characterized their briefs and the research that they did as "untrustworthy."  Ouch!

Sanctions were imposed against Mr. Rogers and his co-counsel in the amount of $18,981 which were paid by the lawyers in 2000.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the Blade in publishing this article was doing the victory lap around the financial bones of Mr.George C. Rogers.  It goes without saying that the article by reporter Erica Blake was entirely misleading; losing the lawsuit to the Toledo Blade does not appear to have had any relationship to the bankruptcy, but then again who knows.  Let me add and I hope this BLAWG-post doesn't appear to be a gratuitous attack upon the Toledo Blade.  The Blade is an awesome newspaper, it won a Pulitizer prize a number of years ago for it's coverage of the Catholic Clergy Scandals which repeatedly quoted me (I am not a Toledo attorney), and I am not knocking the paper.  I am empathizing with the brother, bad lawyer--Mr. Rogers.

You see, I do know that lawyers lose lawsuits.  Sometimes, lawyers are so bad, that they lose the lawsuit in spectacular fashion--through their own stupidity, or incompetence.  More often, the loss is the outcome of the evidence and the law as perceived by the jury or the judge.  Just the OUTCOME.

When I was a young litigator I thought I was in charge of the OUTCOME.  This mindset made me a terrible attorney.  I distorted everything I presented in court in a misguided effort to zealously represent my client, in otherwords to get money for my client and me.  This approach made me unreliable and untrustworthy.  As a consequence I was ineffective, to a degree where I couldn't trust my own judgments let alone anything that came out of my mouth. Thank God!, a judge had mercy on me.   Judge H. told me I was full of shit and that I needed to make a big change or get out. I changed.  The overall outcomes for clients improved dramatically.  Maybe the outcomes improved because with better judgment I took better cases, but I know I started to do just my job--simple advocacy:  present the facts unvarnished and let the outcomes be determined by the judges and juries.

Lawyers are messengers, not the message--even good lawyer forget this fact at their client's peril.  The Lawyer's job is to create the scenario for and supply the evidence for just and appropriate outcomes.  Then get out of the way.

True, there are lousy  and unjust OUTCOMES attributable (in the rare circumstance) to crooked or corrupt judges, to incompetent judges, or (most instances to) judges who make mistakes.  In some cases the lawyer dared to try to extend the reach of the remedies and mercies of the law to clients who traditionally get no remedies.   This latter approach--daring to reach for remedies is the Bad Lawyer Way.  It is the path to sanctions, condemnation and ridicule, and the path to"going bust."