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A Miscellany
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Robert Wechsler
Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.
According to an Associated Press article last week, the State Bar of Arizona is considering allegations that the former Maricopa county attorney brought criminal cases against two county officials to embarrass them and charged a judge with bribery when he knew the charges were false. All the charges brought by the county attorney were dismissed. (For more on the disciplinary charges, see the Wikipedia page)
Why would he have brought false charges? The attorney prosecuting the case says the false charges were retaliation against political opponents. The charges of harassment, back and forth, were so bad that Kenneth Feinberg was brought in last year to sort them out (see my blog post on this).
The former county attorney says he was trying to root out corruption in the county and faced serious roadblocks from county officials.
In other words, the internecine warfare has merely moved from one forum to another.
Attorney Fees for Ethics Respondents
Attorney fees for ethics respondents is a controversial issue. According to an article this week in the Courier-Journal, last year, the Louisville council placed a provision in its ethics code to allow officials to hire outside counsel to defend them in ethics proceedings, and a council member was the first to profit from this (see a blog post on her case). The provision also covered the council member's appeal of the ethics commission ruling, but it did not cover the council's expulsion hearing.
A pleasant surprise is that, despite a long and hard-fought proceeding, the attorney fees are not exceptionally high, nothing like the supposed $100,000 plus by a Stamford, CT official, the $390,000 raised by Sarah Palin's legal defense fund, or the over $2 million supposedly rung up by Rep. Charles Rangel.
The council member's ethics proceeding representation cost $53,153.90 plus "a small number of hours" for the appeal. Her attorney charged $150, half his usual rate; he was contracted by the county attorney's office. The prosecuting attorney for the ethics proceeding charged $14,300, and the hearing officer cost $9,781.25. Both charged only $125 an hour.
If the local government is going to pay, it should be permitted to either hire the official's attorney or negotiate a good rate. There is no reason that an official's intransigence and opulence should cost a local government hundreds of thousands of dollars, or that it should be the basis for the pay to play extravaganza known as a legal defense fund.
There is also the issue of whether attorney fees should be paid only when a case is dismissed, or divvied up as part of a settlement.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
203-859-1959
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.
According to an Associated Press article last week, the State Bar of Arizona is considering allegations that the former Maricopa county attorney brought criminal cases against two county officials to embarrass them and charged a judge with bribery when he knew the charges were false. All the charges brought by the county attorney were dismissed. (For more on the disciplinary charges, see the Wikipedia page)
Why would he have brought false charges? The attorney prosecuting the case says the false charges were retaliation against political opponents. The charges of harassment, back and forth, were so bad that Kenneth Feinberg was brought in last year to sort them out (see my blog post on this).
The former county attorney says he was trying to root out corruption in the county and faced serious roadblocks from county officials.
In other words, the internecine warfare has merely moved from one forum to another.
Attorney Fees for Ethics Respondents
Attorney fees for ethics respondents is a controversial issue. According to an article this week in the Courier-Journal, last year, the Louisville council placed a provision in its ethics code to allow officials to hire outside counsel to defend them in ethics proceedings, and a council member was the first to profit from this (see a blog post on her case). The provision also covered the council member's appeal of the ethics commission ruling, but it did not cover the council's expulsion hearing.
A pleasant surprise is that, despite a long and hard-fought proceeding, the attorney fees are not exceptionally high, nothing like the supposed $100,000 plus by a Stamford, CT official, the $390,000 raised by Sarah Palin's legal defense fund, or the over $2 million supposedly rung up by Rep. Charles Rangel.
The council member's ethics proceeding representation cost $53,153.90 plus "a small number of hours" for the appeal. Her attorney charged $150, half his usual rate; he was contracted by the county attorney's office. The prosecuting attorney for the ethics proceeding charged $14,300, and the hearing officer cost $9,781.25. Both charged only $125 an hour.
If the local government is going to pay, it should be permitted to either hire the official's attorney or negotiate a good rate. There is no reason that an official's intransigence and opulence should cost a local government hundreds of thousands of dollars, or that it should be the basis for the pay to play extravaganza known as a legal defense fund.
There is also the issue of whether attorney fees should be paid only when a case is dismissed, or divvied up as part of a settlement.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
203-859-1959
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