Ex-Lawyer Appeals for Mercy on Career-Death Penalty

We all like to think we’d own up to our mistakes and misjudgments, but most of us only ponder such things in the abstract. What if it were reality, and the rhythms of your successful life suddenly were jeopardized? What if your family, your house, your career, your reputation all hung in the balance because you made the Big Blunder?

How desperate would you get? How far would you go to protect yourself?

This was the test then-Orange County defense lawyer William Yacobozzi Jr. faced seven years ago.

It is fair to say he failed miserably.

Yacobozzi, who was married at the time, had an affair with a woman who, several years later, in 1988, named him in a paternity suit. Yacobozzi disputed the claim, but a blood test showed an overwhelming likelihood he was the father.

Yacobozzi asked for a follow-up DNA test but, in the ultimate deceit, arranged for another man to provide the sample. Even after the scheme was exposed, Yacobozzi denied it and went to trial on charges that he lied about the incident.

The result: convictions in 1992 on various counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and falsifying evidence.

“I lived in Newport Beach in a million-dollar house, his and hers Ferraris--I lost every bit of that,” Yacobozzi says today. “My wife divorced me, I paid off the paternity girl; for a significant time I had no income, and I had to go to jail.”

And in what may have been the most painful blow of all, he resigned his law practice--a formality considering he almost certainly would have been disbarred.

Past is prologue.

Yacobozzi, now 58, wants his law license back. Required to wait five years, he has petitioned the State Bar Court and will find out in the next 90 days if, in a sense, he can come back from the dead.

The conventional wisdom might well be that a perjured lawyer should face the “death penalty” when it comes to practicing law again.

“You have competing interests,” says Frederick G. Slabach, associate dean of Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa. “One is the interest in the public having trust and confidence in the legal profession. The other is being able to allow a person to rehabilitate himself or herself.”

Slabach isn’t familiar with Yacobozzi’s case and expressed no opinion about his reinstatement. But when I ask about a lawyer convicted of perjury, Slabach, noting they are officers of the court, says: “It’s more than just whether the public can trust him; can the court trust him?”

Slabach adds, however, that lifetime bans shouldn’t be automatic for once-discredited lawyers. Reinstatement should depend on the particulars of the case and whether the penitent has conformed to State Bar guidelines regarding reinstatement, he says.

Which brings us back to Yacobozzi, a former congressional candidate who was once described by a Times reporter as someone “who loves taking on hard-nosed prosecutors in cases that seem lost causes--and winning them.”

Yacobozzi says he regrets his deeds of a decade ago and has done everything he can to meet the guidelines for reinstatement. Conceding the misguided decisions he made, he also notes, “It wasn’t in my law practice, it was in my personal life. That’s why I don’t agree that it’s a grievous crime. It was bad, OK, but it wasn’t like I stole money from a client or lied with or through a client. It was a personal matter.”

I don’t know Yacobozzi, who now lives in San Jose. Nor will I make the spirited defense for him that he’d like me to make.

The DNA ruse was rank--worse, in my eyes, than lying about it. Rank enough that it cost him his livelihood and the life he knew.

But does a desperate act, however calculated at the time, define a person’s character forever?

If I were the State Bar judge deciding Yacobozzi’s fate, I’d consult not only the case law but human nature.

That is, with everything on the line, isn’t it possible any of us might make a terrible mistake in judgment?

And if so, should we never be forgiven for it?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.