Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Sunday, October 15, 2006 7:09:50 PM
In a week and a few hours
DA Carol Chambers goes on trial for her professional life. Before that trial convenes, I hope the participants ask themselves the following questions.
1. Is what we are doing in the public interest. Will any DA anywhere be willing to try to stop an active criminal from committing crimes against his litigation opponent if we proceed?
2. Are we using the machinery we control to intimidate Chambers in exactly the same way we are accusing her of using her machinery to intimidate Steiner?
3. If the Collection Company were using an attorney to magnify a $300 debt into a $3,000, $4,000, or more judgment, would the Collection Company's tactics stand up to a Grand Jury investigation of its practices? Would Steiner's?
4. I am very suspicious of the apparent decision to file in District Court where attorneys fees might be 20 or so times what they would be in Small Claims Court. Are the attorneys fees in judgments actually paid to the attorney or are they a Collection Company profit center? (Yes, there is an unasked question here too.)
5. Did the head of Attorney Regulation mislead the press and public when he claimed Steiner had a professional obligation to make a report?
6. Assume that I am eventually successful in ripping the attorney regulation machinery from the legal profession's control and placing it outside the Supreme Court's ability to impact (not an impossibility). Would my actions, individually and collectively, stand the inspection of a totally unbiased future layman version of attorney regulation whose interest was, first and foremost, in protecting the public?
7. The interesting thing about blemishing one's integrity is that the blemish may fade, but it doesn't disappear. Does an attorney's blemished integrity potentially forever impair the priviledge of practicing law?
I do not know DA Chambers. I have never met or spoken to her, and did not know she existed until ten days ago. This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue for me. It is an issue of the choice between good public policy and what I consider to be very bad public policy. If you wish to impose this policy on the public, at least do it through the legislature, not by going after a DA who appears to me to be trying to protect a member of the public.
You might guess that I have some
personal history with the
issue that I am not yet prepared to discuss. You might well be correct.