Standards Apply To Lawyers, Too
A Richland lawyer did nothing to spruce up his profession’s battered image last week when he recommended that a convicted felon - and fellow attorney - be allowed to keep practicing law.
Fortunately, the state Bar Association’s disciplinary board and the state Supreme Court will have a chance to apply soberer reasoning before the issue is decided.
It was the disciplinary board that appointed Thomas Heye as a hearing officer in a disbarment move against Spokane attorney Ronald Kappelman. Kappelman, one of the defendants in a major cocaine case known as “Operation Doughboy,” pleaded guilty in 1994 to three federal charges involving cocaine use. His license has been suspended.
But Heye sees things this way: Lawyers, judges - they’re human. And all humans “miss the mark in the conduct of our day-to-day lives in more ways than we ever choose to admit to ourselves.”
Nobody should lose his professional license over something he put into his own body, reasons Heye. The federal anti-drug war in reality is an assault on human nature.
Heye’s libertarian notions about drug laws aside, his readiness to preempt legislative roles is one of the attitudes that angers so many Americans about the legal system.
Lawyers, officers of the court, aren’t supposed to write the law, they’re supposed to uphold it. Well-established rules and procedures frown on those who go so far as to break it, which Kappelman did.
Now he faces certain penalties. Some because he violated the law, some because he violated the standards of his profession.
If the law or the standards are wrong there are accepted ways to challenge them. And the time for that was during Kappelman’s trial.
Kappelman’s already had his share of breaks.
His convictions could have resulted in a $20,000 fine and a prison sentence. He got a $2,000 fine and three months of work-release followed by three months of home confinement.
When he violated his probation by using cocaine again almost immediately, a judge gave him only another month of work-release instead of sending him to prison.
When he did it yet again, the prosecutor urged: “The public’s perception of the integrity of the judicial system requires that he be sentenced harshly and fairly, as other defendants would be sentenced.”
The judge gave Kappelman 90 more days of home confinement.
The state Bar Association’s disciplinary board at least has moved to disbar Kappelman. Now even that process has produced hearing officer Heye’s amazing recommendation.
For the most part, lawyers get a bum rap. The indiscriminate beating their profession takes from comedians and others is overdone. If you had to go to court, whom would you rather have by your side, Jerry Seinfeld or Gerry Spence?
And if you’re a lawyer, whom would you prefer to have defending your profession’s reputation, the state Bar’s disciplinary board, or Thomas Heye?
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board