Chief trial counsel james towery

This organization has been more or less in a perpetual state of crisis for 30 years and they have learned to function through adversity.

The recently amended fee bill in the Legislature embraces governance reform a little less than the minority advocated but a whole lot more than the majority wanted. And the majority had the chutzpah to oppose the compromise. This process is going a certain direction and even if it goes no further unlikely in my view it has effectively ended any legitimate support for the myth of lawyer self-regulation. For another, there is the apparent interference by the Executive Director in the operations of the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel.

Towery and giving it to General Counsel Starr Babcock. This is unprecedented, as far as I know. A recent memo from Mr. This appears to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Business and Professions Code section Clearly, the Executive Director has a concern with the information that was coming from the Office of Chief Trial Counsel.

Was Jim Towery pressured to leave because he told some inconvenient truths? The Legislature, for now, is content to move incrementally. But it has put a mechanism in place to plan for a transition. That transition should be to a new independent agency within the judicial branch to handle the government regulatory functions without the stigma of being run by those it regulates and a new voluntary California Bar Association that can function as a true trade organization and advocate for the profession without one hand tied behind its back.

Nothing short of this will cure the dysfunction of the State Bar of California. He assumed the helm of the employee Office of Chief Trial Counsel last July, although his appointment was subject to state Senate confirmation. The Senate had one year from the date he took office to confirm his appointment, or it would be deemed rejected, and confirmation has not yet occurred.

Efforts to reach members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to inquire into the reasons for the delay yesterday were unsuccessful. The attorney served as State Bar president in , after a year-long stint chairing the Board of Governors discipline committee.

He also previously served as chair of the. The Innocence Project report found that only 10 criminal prosecutors had been subject to bar discipline between and , and only six of the cases involved actual prosecutorial misconduct, all for withholding evidence, as opposed to discipline for other reasons e. Moreover, as noted in the report, all of these disciplines occurred after , when the California Commission on the Administration of Justice was established.

This reluctance has been analyzed by one noted scholar of legal ethics. Similarly, disciplinary authorities tend to focus on intentional misconduct by lawyers whose actions are self-serving or governed by greed.

Such misconduct often reflects a lawyer who is likely to commit additional violations, because the lawyer will continue to be influenced by personal incentives unless taught a lesson. In another matter I handled as a discipline prosecutor, I was repeatedly told that we did not have enough evidence to move forward despite judicial findings that exculpatory evidence had been withheld.

This case ultimately resulted in discipline many years later. The office also works closely with law enforcement and the criminal prosecutors on many issues. Not only Mr. Fox but other members of the Board of Trustees have criminal posecutor on their resumes. Without the benefit of a specific prosecutor misconduct rule, Mr. Field was charged with acts of committing acts of moral turpitude Bus. Code section by various misrepresentations, withholding evidence, and showing lack of respect for the court, failing to obey court orders requiring discovery, and violating his duty under Bus.

Code section a to uphold the law by violating discovery statutes in the Penal Code. In the years since Ben Field, there has been only one other prosecution of a prosecutor for withholding evidence, a case that resulted in a public reproval. It is certainly a good idea to adopt a prosecutor misconduct rule. But my experience and the example of Ben Field suggest that the problem is not so much a lack of the proper tools that all-purpose Swiss Army Knife known as section and its only slightly less broad cousin section a , for instance but a lack of proper motivation.

That cannot be cured by a rule change. Except to the extent that the fact of the rule change sends a strong signal from the top to potential offenders that this behavior we want you to change, that we want you to aspire to something greater.