Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Monday, September 11, 2006 1:20:06 AM
This is the first in a series of posts which will examine all aspects of the legal ethics system, whose every facet appears designed by the state supreme court to fail. Or, rather, designed to protect lawyers and judges at the public's expense.
Each post in the series will be named "Designed to Fail" with a Part number, and be linked together in a manner that hopefully will make them easy to read and locate. Eventually, I will publish a linked index.
Long ago, someone told me that when writing or speaking, I should tell folks what I am going to tell them, then I should tell them, and finally I should tell them what I told them.
When the bill of rights was promulgated in 1789, the First Amendment gave citizens the right to petition their government and took from congress the power to to limit that right in any way. A regulatory complaint by a citizen against a doctor, lawyer, judge, undertaker, real estate broker, barber or whatever is nothing more or less than a petition to the government for redress.
The state supreme court has determined that the right to petition without limit is at best an inconvenient right and has, in some ethics cases totally prohibited a litigant from making a complaint, and in others placed rules in effect that force a damaged litigant to make a complaint through his attorney, and only through his attorney. Of course, attorneys are not inexpensive, and going through an attorney to make a complaint will cost $1500 and up.
While the state supreme court does not allow litigants who are damaged by unethical legal practices to sue the lawyer doing the damage, it does allow lawyers who are the subject of complaints to sue the person making the complaint. Any attorney who assists in preparing a complaint can also be sued. Court rules forbid individuals who are represented by an attorney from making a complaint directly without first firing his attorney. Amazingly, judges who follow their own ethics code and refer an unethical attorney to Attorney Regulation are not immune from lawsuits.
If a litigant persists and is willing to spend the thousands of dollars it is likely to take to make a complaint, Attorney Regulation has a record of accepting "remorse" as a legitimate mitigating factor and frequently administers private censure or public censure as the only penalty. Attorney Regulation may be the only "paperless" office in all of Colorado government. Paperless offices have no records, and thus dodge the open records laws. Attorney Regulation is an "investigative" office without any funds to do any investigations. (The reader is likely beginning to gather why this series is named "designed to fail.")
We will also be exploring the Commission on Judicial Discipline, the only "secret" commission in state government. It is so secret, that it makes an effort to keep the fact that it operates secretly a secret. If you don't believe this, take a look at its
web page now and try to ascertain under what authority it was formed and try find any hint that persons who submit complaints may not reveal the fact that they have complained or the final resolution of their complaint. This page is designed to suck up complaints before they get to the newspapers and ensure that they never become public knowledge. My view is that the page itself is unethical.
This series will not discuss fixes. It will have more than 20 "parts."
Part 1