THE
NEW JERSEY
SUPREME COURT
COMMITTEE
ON CHARACTER
(or
Who Will Guard the
Guardians?)
In 1992 I
represented pro
bono Mr. Timothy Maguire, who had passed the New Jersey Bar exam
but was
initially denied admission to the Bar by a local panel of the Committee
on
Character, on the ground that he had supposedly shown an inclination to
betray
"either the obligation of truthfulness or the obligation of
confidentiality." That determination was reversed at the State
level, and Mr. Maguire was admitted to the Bar, but the record showed
that the
three lawyers who made that accusation were so determined to persecute
him for
political incorrectness that they themselves engaged in deception,
abuse of
power, and highly unprofessional misconduct. Although I fully
presented
that misconduct to the State Chair of the Committe on Character and two
of his
colleagues, they took no action, other than to reverse my client's
exclusion
from the Bar.
On this page, I will name names and produce the evidence. You can
decide
for yourselves whether these three lawyers, Mary J. Maudsley, Richard
Hluchan,
and Richard Fauntleroy, were qualified to judge anyone's character.
You
can also judge whether Mary Maudsley, in particular, was fit to serve
as Chair of the Disciplinary
Review Board
of the State of New Jersey, as she did from 2003 to 2005.
In 1991, when he was a third year student at Georgetown Law Center, Mr.
Maguire
published an article in a student newspaper pointing out significant
disparities in the academic qualifications of white and black students
at the
law school. He was charged with having improperly released
information
gleaned from his employment in the Law Center Admissions Office; he
responded
that the information he released was not confidential, since no names
were
used. The matter was resolved in a written "Disposition",
agreed to by the Law Center and Mr. Maguire, in which he received a
private
reprimand that was not included in his official transcript.
He reported the incident when he applied for admission to the
Bar. Ms.
Maudsley, on behalf of the Committe on Character, requested that Mr.
Maguire
appear before her and Messrs. Hluchan and Fauntleroy for a hearing on
April 16,
1992. He did so, accompanied by a pro bono lawyer
from
Washington who had represented him in his dealings with
Georgetown. The
Part Panel, which I will refer to as "Maudsley & Co.", refused to
let that lawyer represent him, and insisted that he either hire a New
Jersey
lawyer (he was unemployed at the time) or represent himself. He
chose the
latter.
Six months after the hearing, Maudsley & Co. issued a written
opinion finding Mr. Maguire unfit to practice law in New
Jersey. The
opinion claimed that he had "sign[ed] a document that he knew to be
untrue" and indicated he might advise clients to do likewise, and that
he
believed "that attorney-client confidentiality is subject to individual
interpretation."
Maudsley & Co. supported those allegations by quoting excerpts from
Mr.
Maguire's testimony, condensing it on several occasions by using
ellipses.
Three of those ellipses so distorted Mr. Maguire's testimony as to
render
innocuous comments into damning admissions.
At the hearing, Mr. Fauntleroy asked Mr. Maguire whether he might
advise his
clients to sign untrue statements, merely to avoid unpleasant
consequences. Maudsley & Co. quoted his response exactly as
follows:
As
a general rule, no, but I think there are exceptions to
that....There are exceptions
where the
failure to sign an
untrue document presents
consequences
so severe that a
lawyer in good conscience
would have to
tell a client to
sign it,...” Transcript: pp.
56:20 -
57:5
That
passage
certainly makes it appear Mr. Maguire might be unduly flexible with the
truth,
but what was in those ellipses? The first missing passage was as
follows:
If
you have a gun pointed to your head, that would be one thing,
but let's think about the
real world
and what is an exception
and what is not. That
becomes
more difficult.
Here is the second:
and
I do not think it would be a lawyer's obligation to
have a client get shot in the
head by
him failing to
sign an untrue statement.
Check the evidence by clicking here to see that actual pages from Mr. Maguire's complete testimony. Click here and go to page 7 of the document (a scanned replica of the original) to see how Maudsley & Co. distorted the evidence.
The third misuse of ellipsis related to the accusation that Mr. Maguire might disregard attorney client confidentiality. Here is how Maudsley and Co. quoted testimony they characterized as Mr. Maguire "sum[ming] up his position:
If
I was an attorney there would be situations when I would
violate a client’s confidence
and if
that hurts my standing
with this bar that is fine...
I think
there are values more
important than
rules. Transcript
pp. 77-78
Once
again, our hero
certainly sounds as if he could be careless with client
confidences. But
this is what he said where Maudsley & Co. put those three little
dots
above:
I
have an acquaintance now who is an attorney and I am
his client. He is going
through
some mental problems and
I am fearful about his mental
health
and life. I would break
his confidence in a minute to
save
him. If you are telling
me the rules are more
important it is
not worth it for me
to be a member of the bar of
this
state.
Click here to see the genuine transcript of what Tim
actually
said. Click here and go again to page 7
to see
how Maudsley & Co. misrepresented it.
No one to whom I have shown this
record
has disagreed that the omitted statements were highly material to a
fair sense
of Tim Maguire's testimony. Any lawyer who fraudulently misused
ellipses
three times in one brief before a judge in this state might well
end up
before Ms. Maudsley's Disciplinary Review Board. The deliberate
distortion of Tim's statements can only have been calculated to mislead
the
reader, whether intentionally or as the result of misplaced zeal and
poor
judgment I cannot say. As mentioned above, the full Committee on
Character essentially "covered up" this misconduct by the local
panel. I planned to write a letter to the Chief Justice calling
the
Court's attention to the conduct of the local panel, but I was then at
McCarter
& English, and the "powers that be" in the firm at the time
leaned heavily on me not to do so. Now that I have my own firm,
I have
put the record of this case online (with Mr. Maguire's consent), so
that the
public can judge for itself.
As mentioned above, effective
April 1,
2003, the Chief Justice appointed Mary Maudsley as Chair of the
New
Jersey Disciplinary Review Board, the body with primary responsibility
for
lawyer discipline in this state. Shortly before the appointment
became
effective, on March 25, 2003, I wrote Ms. Maudsley a private letter asking for her comments
on the
issues raised on this page. She ignored my letter, and so I
have
felt free to make it public. A year later, I learned that Ms.
Maudsley
had been appointed to a second term as chair of the New Jersey
DRB. On
March 10, 2004, I wrote her again,
politely asking
that she take responsibility for what happened in this case. Once
again,
she ignored me. More important, however, is the fact
that,
although she has presumably read my letters and this page, she has
never disputed
any part of the allegations they contain.
A year later, I had occasion to write Mr. Fauntleroy, who had
become Chair of the entire New Jersey Committee on Character, to inform
him of the allegations against him on this website and to request that
he recuse himself from a pending matter. He too never responded
to my letter or denied what I had written about him.
In another context, I recently came
across an article
by Christoper
Hitchens, in which he made the following comment:
By the same token, if I write
an
article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis
like this
(…), I swear on my children that I
am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the
original
meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers
or
viewers are to be despised.
At least some members of the New Jersey Committee on Character
apparently disagree.
In addition to Ms. Maudsley holding the
chair of the Disciplinary
Review Board, the two other members of the panel that wrote the
misleading opinion also achieved positions of distinction in the New
Jersey bar. As stated above, Richard Fauntleroy later served on
the statewide Committee on
Character and was elevated to State Chair, a position he held until
some time in 2005. Richard Hluchan serves on the editorial board
of the New Jersey Law
Journal. This web page has been public for at least
five years. No one has ever challenged a single word of it.
