Working with Killers

For the third time, a bar applicant with a felony murder in his past has been denied admission to the New York State Bar. In re Application of Anonymous for Admission as an Attorney and Counselor-at-Law, No. M-1559 (N.Y. App. Div. Feb. 18, 2014). Back in the 1970s, he was in all sorts of trouble, having been arrested for forgery, for cocaine sales, and for the death of an elderly woman whose apartment he had burglarized with a codefendant. After serving five years of a prison sentence, he attended law school and passed the bar exam. The applicant, now 66, first applied for bar admission in 1985, then again in the 1990s, and now most recently in the new millennium. For much of the last 30 years, the applicant has worked as a paralegal.

So the applicant did his time, turned his life around, and has apparently been a very capable paralegal for three decades, but apparently that’s not sufficient character and fitness to be allowed to practice law in New York. The problem? He’s sorry but not sorry enough.

“[W]e take into account the applicant’s seemingly unblemished personal life since his release from incarceration as well as his commendable work ethic, but we remain troubled by either his inability or his unwillingness to retreat from what seems to be a continuing defensive posture in accounting for aspects of his criminal history,” the majority opinion reads.

Dissenting judge Richard Andrias notes that the applicant has spent decades atoning for his misdeeds, has helped senior citizens, and even worked for a Supreme Court Justice in New York County. “As the former Justice who testified on petitioner’s behalf eloquently stated, ‘punishments—all punishments ––– must some day come to an end.’ … Nothing further can be accomplished, other than as an inappropriate punitive measure, by denying his application for admission, which poses no threat to the public,” Andrias writes.

Whether one agrees with the majority or the lone dissenter in this particular case, the character and fitness of all sorts of figures in one’s workplace may well not withstand close scrutiny. Here, someone who has been punished appropriately and is now working productively may well be found in any of our workplaces, in your office, in everyone’s neighborhood; but he apparently just can’t be promoted to attorney. That this particular applicant’s past is known, while the misdeeds of so many others are hidden, makes him, in many ways, admirable. He acted poorly, he was punished for it, and he has changed his life around. How many practicing lawyers can actually admit to that?

—Lori Tripoli