This is one of a series of essays intended to inform the public about the bad behavior of lawyer legislators like Representative Morgan Carroll. We want prospective clients of badly behaving legislators firms to understand that lawyers fear that jurors might see essays like this and deep six their lawsuits, leaving clients with a big legal bill and not much else.
While it is true that a judge can order the jurors involved not to discover who the lawyers are, and how unethically they behave through an internet search engine, lawyers are concerned that it can't be prevented. Lawyers understand that a juror who wants to google the lawyers won't get caught as long as he doesn't tell anyone what he has done, either during or after the trial. Lawyers are being told to take care about what they put on their own web sites.
We begin the Behaving Badly process by identifying lawyer-legislator targets whom everyone, Republican or Democrat, will agree has behaved badly once they know what was done. Then we send the target a series of questions, usually five, designed to both highlight what has happened and to elicit a defense, if the target has one. To date, not a single behaving badly essay target has had the courage to respond, which should tell the reader much of what he/she needs to know.
Here are the five questions that were sent to Representative Morgan Carroll at her official state email account:
1. Currently the state judicial performance commission consists ten members. Four are lawyers. Lawyers are regulated and licensed by the Supreme Court and thus no claim can be made that they are independent of the Supreme Court. Two non lawyers are appointed by the Chief Justice, meaning that she directly impacts either the appointment or income of six of the ten members. HB 1227 would have reduced that to four, making the justices marginally accountable to the public, instead of totally unaccountable. You voted against it. How can you defend your vote as being in the public interest?
2. Less than a month after your vote, it was reported that the Chief Justice's staff was involved in what might be obstruction of justice by allegedly interfering with the criminal prosecution of a former judge. Since that is an obvious outcome of your vote against judicial accountability, it seems reasonable to ask you when you will be calling for a full investigation of this assault on the public trust?
3. Your law firm takes pride in its Bar Association activities, including its participation in ethics rule making and enforcement. As a litigant who has tried to use the ethics system that was devised in the period that your mother served on the study committee, it can be accurately stated that the rules sound fine, but court rules make it impossible to access many of them, at all (dilatory practices) or prohibitively expensive to make a complaint. How can your firm claim, as it does, to be "helping the underdog balance the scales of justice," when it so actively participates in actions which deny justice to people who are damaged by unethical attorneys?
4. It is possible for an opposing attorney to stall a lawsuit for a year or more simply by not cooperating and then claiming that what ever happened was his fault and his client is blameless. The opposing litigant can't file a complaint and of course his client, being well served by the delay, won't. The result is that litigants cannot get their cases heard and lawyers get to run up their client's bills. That too is a product of your mother's work. Please explain why your firm takes such pride in a situation that serves the legal profession but does not protect the public in any way.
5. HB 1227 would have required judges to be evaluated half way through their term. The current situation only allows judges to be evaluated during the last year of their term, ignoring all other years of service. It is possible for a District Court Judge to manipulate the timing of embarrassing cases so that they fall outside this limited window. How was your vote against that part of HB 1227 in the public interest?
These questions were submitted on April 19, 2007, and remain unanswered. We believe that the reason that they were not answered is that they were an embarrassing illustration of Morgan Carroll's duplicity. She appears to believe that the practice of law is so compartmentalized that she can go into court and argue for "accountability" and "justice," and keep secret from the jury the fact that she opposes those two concepts when they might be applied to her own profession.
Quoting from her firm's web site: We are proud to be third generation attorneys in a Colorado law firm, helping the underdog balance the scales of justice.
Great hype, but is it true? Suppose a citizen felt he had a legitimate complaint to make about the conduct of a Supreme Court Justice. Representative Carroll knowingly created a situation where it would be nearly impossible for the public to find out about that misconduct through the state judicial performance commission by voting with her party against HB 1227 to ensure that six of ten members would have an allegiance to the Chief Justice.
Citizen complaints against individual justices are much more likely to occur than one might imagine. The Supreme Court elects the Chief Justice from among its members and the Chief Justice serves only as long as he/she can maintain a majority. That organizational system makes each justice individually responsible for the misconduct of the Chief Justice, and the current Chief Justice appears to believe that she is above the law, and not subject to the constraints of common decency.
The sad thing is that the Chief Justice may well be above the law as this little escapade suggests. Since we published that essay, not a single public official has suggested that there should be an investigation. We are not suggesting that we are sufficiently powerful to promote an investigation, only that if the scales of justice are to be in balance as the Bradley and Carroll, P.C. falsely suggest they want, there really should be an investigation. It simply is not in the public interest that the Supreme Court think it can twist justice and avoid the rule of law. Sadly, Carroll disagrees.
Representative Morgan Carroll routinely uses her legislative position to slam her hand down on the scales of justice. We wish she would have enough integrity not to claim on her firm's web site that she tries to get justice for the little guy.
In our view, one of the more obnoxious pieces of political treachery in recent years is House Concurrent Resolution 1001, which is nothing more than an act of revenge by the legislature against the people for passing the Polis Amendment (41). If the voters are dumb enough to pass the referendum it will create, the initiative process will, effectively, cease to exist. Not only did Representative Carroll vote for HCR 1001, she co-sponsored it!
Since she has drawn our attention by behaving badly, we decided to see what her law firm's site had to say about her partner and mother, Rebecca Bradley.
Her professional activities have included membership on the Supreme Court/Colorado Bar Association Joint Committee to study the model Rules of Professional Conduct (1987-1990); Secretary of the Colorado Bar Association Ethics Committee (1978-1995); CBA Workers’ Compensation Section Chair (1983-1984); and Adams County Bar Association Representative to the Board of Governors (1973-1975). She is or has been a member of the Denver, Boulder, and Jefferson County Bar Associations; Colorado Trial Lawyers Association (Board of Directors for eight terms). She also is or has been a member of the American Trial Lawyers Association, National Association of Women Lawyers, Colorado Women’s Bar Association, International Law Society, Denver University Law School Chapter. Ms. Bradley has regularly contributed to the Colorado Appellate Handbook updates.
We admit that this looks like a very impressive resume. It is to people who don't understand how fraudulently the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct were written and are "enforced." For example, the rule against a lawyer conducting his profession in a dilatory manner has been effectively unenforced for almost two decades.
We wonder how much Rebecca Bradley had to do with that outrage, given her long service to her profession and her daughter's cavalier attitude toward any reasonable amount of judicial and legal profession accountability.
Doubtless both Morgan Carroll and Rebecca Bradley demand that jurors hold others accountable when they are in a courtroom, but compartmentalization is the nature of the legal profession. Neither seems to want to hold their own profession accountable. Successful lawyers hope that compartmentalization will work for them and that they won't be punished by clients and jurors for behaving badly. Time will tell if that hope will be justified or dashed in the internet age.
