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
