Yagman Forced to Suspend His Law Practice

Civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman, who has butted heads with police departments all over Southern California and tangled with two of the state’s most powerful judges, has been ordered suspended from practice for six months following a series of disputes with former clients.

In a brief order made public Thursday, the California Supreme Court also ordered Yagman, who was found by the State Bar to be “aggressive, hostile and forceful with his clients,” to obtain psychiatric counseling or submit a written statement from a psychiatrist that he does not need psychiatric help.

Yagman, who specializes in police brutality cases, has called the disciplinary proceedings a “witch hunt” attributable to his public criticism of state Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas and Manuel Real, chief judge of the federal court in Los Angeles, whom he accused of having “mental disorders.”

“It is the system’s pay back. It all smacks of ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ where not fitting into the system results in behavior modification,” the lawyer said in a statement released shortly after the State Bar recommended the suspension last year.

“My civil rights clients want an aggressive, forceful advocate for their rights, and no doubt the system will perceive such an advocate as hostile,” the statement said.

Yagman was out of town Thursday and could not be reached for comment.

Yagman has also publicly distributed a sworn statement from Thomas Szasz, a New York psychiatrist who is considered the founder of the anti-psychiatry movement, asserting that requiring Yagman to seek psychiatric help is “absurd and odious.”

Termed an ‘Invasion’

“Coerced psychotherapy, like coerced religious conversion, is an invasion of personal and spiritual privacy,” said Szasz, author of “The Myth of Mental Illness.”

The San Francisco-based high court’s order--filed Wednesday but not made public until Thursday--was signed by Justice Allen E. Broussard, acting in behalf of Lucas, who did not participate in the case.

The chief justice gave no reason for removing himself from the matter. But it was believed likely Lucas did so because of Yagman’s strenuous opposition to his confirmation as chief justice in February, 1986.

At a hearing by the state Judicial Appointments Commission, Yagman assailed Lucas as an “elitist who . . . favors government and corporate interests over the interests of individuals.” Yagman also called Lucas “a racist and an anti-Semite who believes that blacks, Jews and other minority group members are not entitled to the rights, privileges and immunities of the law.”

Yagman’s feud with Real stemmed from the Los Angeles chief federal judge’s dismissal of one of Yagman’s cases and his subsequent imposition of $250,000 in sanctions on the Westwood lawyer. The sanctions were later reversed, and a federal appeals court ordered Real to reassign the case to another judge in view of the highly publicized dispute.

Damages Against Gates

Yagman, a Brooklyn native and graduate of Fordham University Law School, has represented a wide variety of clients claiming misconduct by local police agencies. He most recently obtained a jury verdict of more than $170,000 in punitive damages personally assessed against Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates in a case in which an East Los Angeles family alleged that officers used excessive force when executing a search warrant in the family’s house.

The suspension order was based on findings that Yagman refused client demands to return case files, failed to provide a written accounting for $50,000 in client funds entrusted to him and charged an “unconscionable fee” to a client in a product liability case.

In issuing the order, the Supreme Court went one step further than the State Bar Review Department, requiring Yagman to notify his clients that he has been suspended and return any advance fees that he has not earned.

The suspension order is effective Feb. 24.

Times staff writer Philip Hager in San Francisco contributed to this article.