Times Writer Wins Top Award from California Bar

Times staff writer Davan Maharaj on Sunday was awarded the State Bar of California’s Golden Medallion Award for excellence in legal affairs reporting for a series about a Laguna Hills lawyer who arranged to inherit millions of dollars from the estates of his elderly Leisure World clients.

In presenting Maharaj its top award for work published by a California newspaper in the past year, the State Bar noted that he had “performed an important public service with his investigative work,” which resulted in new rules governing the professional conduct of lawyers in California.

In making the presentation, State Bar President Harvey Saferstein pointed out that Maharaj’s articles also inspired the enactment of a new law, signed last month by Gov. Pete Wilson, which generally prohibits attorneys from writing themselves into wills and trusts of their clients, and automatically invalidates any such provisions.

The Times articles led to ongoing investigations of lawyer James D. Gunderson by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the State Bar of California, which regulates the practice of law in the state. Over a period of years, Gunderson arranged to receive millions of dollars in cash, stock and real estate from his clients’ estates, despite a longstanding California Supreme Court ruling that anything more than a “modest” bequest to an attorney preparing a will raises questions of impropriety.

Linda Deutsch, of the Associated Press, received the Bar’s Silver Medallion for “her outstanding coverage of the first Rodney King police brutality trial.”

A special merit award was presented to two Los Angeles Times staff writers, Dan Weikel and Rene Lynch, for their articles about Orange County Municipal Judge Claude E. Whitney, who was accused of systematically denying poor defendants their right to an attorney. In August, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that it was reviewing Whitney’s actions.