Court Stays Suspension of Attorney Yagman

A federal appeals court in San Francisco has stayed an order barring Venice civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman from practicing in Los Angeles federal court for criticizing a federal judge.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued the stay late Monday, pending a full appeal, just hours before the two-year suspension was to go into effect.

Appellate Judges Alex Kozinski and Jerome Faris responded to an emergency motion filed by Yagman’s attorney, Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general.

“Mr. Yagman will suffer irreparable harm both to his reputation, to his practice and financially” if the suspension goes into effect, Clark contended in his emergency motion seeking the stay.

The brief also contends that Yagman’s clients would suffer irreparable harm if the suspension went into effect. Yagman, who specializes in representing plaintiffs who are suing law enforcement officers on brutality charges, has 14 trials scheduled between now and the end of the year, according to the brief, which also asserts that the clients would have a difficult time obtaining other attorneys.

Clark also contended that three Los Angeles federal trial judges denied Yagman his due process rights during the hearings that led to the suspension.

Additionally, the brief argued that the key witness against Yagman in the hearing lacks credibility and that lawyers on a federal court disciplinary committee that lodged the charges against him were biased against him.

On July 8, federal trial judges Edward Rafeedie, John G. Davies and David W. Williams issued the highly unusual suspension after finding that Yagman had “impugned the integrity” of the court by his stinging criticisms of their colleague, U.S. District Judge William D. Keller.

Yagman had accused Keller of being anti-Semitic, drunk on the bench, “ignorant, dishonest . . . a bully . . . and one of the worst judges in the United States.”

The judges said Yagman had made these statements in an attempt to force Keller to remove himself from Yagman’s cases. Yagman has consistently denied that he made the criticisms for that purpose.

To buttress this contention, Clark’s brief states that some of Yagman’s comments were made in a letter to Prentice-Hall, which publishes books of judicial profiles, and that the publisher does not state the source of the quotes. “This negates the comments as a technique for inducing recusal,” the brief states.

Yagman said he was pleased with the appeals court action and in a written news release once again lambasted Keller, whom he described as “an ultra-conservative judge who sympathizes with defendants in police brutality cases and who often is intemperate, rude and sarcastic with both attorneys and others in court.”

Yagman also criticized the jurists who suspended him. “These judges want to punish me for expressing my thoughts, but as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said: ‘Without freedom of expression, liberty of thought is a mockery, (because) truth cannot be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to that endeavor or under dangers which only heroes hazard.’ ”