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Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Law - "Keep your eye on the attorneys"
"Keep your eye on the attorneys" warns the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel in an editorial brief:
We need to pay close attention to the legal system. Any of us could find ourselves in the middle of it in one way or another, so we need to know the problem people we might run into, either from the prosecutorial side or the defense side. We’ve seen examples of each lately.Locally, attorney Charles James Rathburn Jr. [see 12/28/06 ILB entry] has been hit with an 18-month suspension of his right to practice by the Indiana Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Commission, which found he neglected his clients. One complaint said he took no action on a client’s case for two years and did not return any of the client’s phone calls. In two other cases, the court said, he took fees from clients he did not help.
On the prosecutorial side, the North Carolina bar has filed ethics charges against Mike Nifong, the district attorney who has behaved so outrageously in the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case, continuing to press the case despite the obvious lack of a case, saying scurrilous things about the defendants to the press and withholding crucial evidence from the defense. The punishment could range from admonishment to disbarment, the latter being far preferable if he can’t actually be thrown in jail.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 2, 2007 07:22 PM
Posted to General Law Related