Questions About Bruce Fein’s Ethics (Update: Link to Supporting Documents)
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]
Update: My post providing the promised for supporting documents is up and here. I purposely bumped it back so that it wouldn’t appear until after even Patterico’s post on Think Progress’ latest dishonesty.
Update II: And thanks to Ed Whelan for the link back.
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On Friday, in the letters section of the New York Times, Bruce Fein, Esq. wrote the following:
Justice Antonin Scalia galloped beyond the farthest boundaries of judicial propriety in secretly meeting on Capitol Hill to discuss the Constitution with Tea Party members of Congress saddled with a co-equal duty to assess the constitutionality of legislative action.
Now James Taranto and Ed Whelan have done admirable jobs deconstructing the inaccuracy of that letter. Simply put, the meeting was not secret, it was not limited to Tea Party people only, and there is absolutely no evidence that Scalia discussed the constitutionality of Obamacare or anything related to any case likely to come before the Court. But Fein goes on to lecture Scalia about the supposed lack of ethics of it, and given what I knew about the man, it was a bit much.
But I have to rewind a little and tell you about another man. This man:
This is Ephraim Chukwuemeka Ugwuonye, Esq. I came to know about him when a colleague contacted me with an ethical conundrum posed by this man’s conduct and much of what I will tell you will come from that friend, although I verified all of the information myself. Mr. Ugwuonye sometimes shortens his middle name to Emeka, and sometimes uses that middle name as if it was his first name as you will see. Mr. Ugwuonye is a first generation immigrant from Nigeria. He is also a graduate of Harvard Law School. And at one time he was admitted and in good standing in Maryland, New York, and the District of Columbia as an attorney.
But in 2008, he was suspended in Maryland for ninety days for various forms of misconduct. The case is, well… colorful and worth a read through. You can read it all here, but it comes down to two major complaints. In one instance, he allegedly promised to just file a suit for wrongful termination—that is, to file it for tactical purposes and then let it die. The client disputed that point, claiming that he was promised that his case would be taken to fruition. Regardless, he failed to communicate with his client after he got notice after notice telling him the case was dying of neglect, and eventually the case was dismissed with prejudice. Which means that if there was any merit in his claim, he had flushed it down the toilet with neglect. In that incident he was charged with having failed to provide timely communications with his client.
The second incident discussed in that case involved taking too much money for a frivolous case. Namely he took $3,500 to take the case of a man who claimed that Montgomery County (Maryland) Crime Solvers owed him a total of $25,500,000. Five hundred thousand of those dollars was allegedly owed for helping to catch the D.C. Snipers, which is stretching plausibility, but its within the realm of possibility. As for the $25 million, his client asserted that he earned that by helping them find Saddam Hussein. Mind you, he felt that the Montgomery Country (Maryalnd) Crime Solvers owed him this money. In footnote thirteen, the court notes dryly: “Saddam Hussein was captured on 13 December 2003 in the cellar of a farmhouse located near the town of Tikrit in Iraq, a location of some distance from Montgomery County, Maryland.” The Court’s point was to argue that you didn’t need $3,500 to figure out that the man’s case was worthless and thus that fee was excessive and unreasonable.
So he was suspended for ninety days in Maryland. And in D.C. and New York by reciprocity. Ninety days later, he was readmitted in Maryland, but something funny happened in D.C. and New York. He was not reinstated in those two jurisdictions (see, e.g. here for his New York status). In D.C. When he was suspended in D.C. the order (linked here) stated that it was