Clinton Disbarment Case Doesn’t Fit the Mold

Most lawyers who are disbarred have stolen money from their clients or have been convicted of serious crimes, a situation that does not apply to President Clinton, experts in legal ethics say.

Across the country, about 800 lawyers are disbarred every year, a number that seems to remain fairly steady. California--with more than 150,000 active lawyers, more than any other state--registered 600 disciplinary cases in a recent year, but only 10% rose to the level where their licenses were permanently yanked.

If legal precedents are any measure of discipline, the disbarment recommendation against Clinton by an Arkansas Supreme Court advisory committee does not fit the usual mold.

A number of prominent law professors and other legal authorities suggested that a temporary suspension of his license, once he leaves the presidency, or a reprimand might be a more appropriate sanction for the less-than-forthcoming answers he gave under oath to questions about his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky.

But some consider the offense to be greater when a lawyer such as Clinton holds the nation’s highest office.

Matthew J. Glavin, president of the conservative Atlanta-based Southeastern Legal Foundation, which filed the first ethics complaint against Clinton, said the committee has sent “a ringing message that the legal system will police its own, regardless of the position held by the attorney in question.”

Glavin said disbarment is appropriate in Clinton’s case, despite any precedents others might cite, because “the integrity of the judicial system” was attacked by the president himself.

In a series of interviews, however, most experts drew the distinction that the “serious misconduct” of which Clinton stands accused by the Arkansas panel did not occur on behalf of a client and therefore makes the infraction less grave.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find cases in the country where an act performed outside one’s role as a lawyer resulted in disbarment, unless it involved a criminal conviction,” said Georgetown University law professor Paul Rothstein.

Howard Brill, an expert on legal ethics at the University of Arkansas, said that he has studied disbarment cases in Clinton’s home state for 15 years and can find none similar to the president’s.

Brill’s survey showed that reprimands, not disbarment, resulted from most situations in which lawyers lied to judges. However, the state Supreme Court has been toughening its attitude in recent years toward misleading statements by attorneys, he added.

Among the more memorable disciplinary cases in Arkansas is that of attorney Sam L. Anderson Jr., who was disbarred in the 1980s after he was convicted of distributing cocaine. Another lawyer, Eugene Fitzhugh, was disbarred and sent to prison when he pleaded guilty to bribing a judge.

Stephen Gillers, an authority on legal ethics at New York University School of Law, insisted that “for a lawyer to lie under oath is a disbarrable offense” unless there are mitigating circumstances.

Without using the term “perjury,” the Arkansas panel found that Clinton committed “serious misconduct,” a charge that no doubt centered on the “false, misleading and evasive” testimony cited by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright last year when she held the president in contempt of court and fined him more than $90,000.

Wright declared that when Clinton was asked in January 1998 if he had been alone with Lewinsky and had engaged in sexual relations with her, “the president responded by giving false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.”

Although the president did not challenge Wright’s contempt order, he is contesting the disbarment recommendation of the ethics panel through Washington attorney David E. Kendall. A state judge in Little Rock, Ark., will determine the penalty, but Clinton could appeal it to the state Supreme Court.

Clinton said that his lawyers “looked at all the precedents and they said there’s no way in the world, if they just treat you like everybody else has been treated, that this is even close to that kind of [disbarment] case.”

Gillers said that he might agree with Clinton because of “mitigating circumstances,” including his record of public service for more than two decades and the fact that his “misleading” testimony about Lewinsky concerned a matter that Judge Wright ultimately excluded as immaterial to Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit.

Rothstein said that another mitigating factor could be “a good-faith belief” by the president that his denial of a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, the former White House intern, was technically correct because Jones’ lawyers agreed to a narrow definition of that term.

Clinton’s supporters also have argued that he viewed the Jones lawsuit as a trumped-up complaint designed to embarrass him politically, and not a legitimate court action.

Former President Nixon, in contrast to Clinton, lost his right to practice law because of “pervasive” offenses in the Watergate scandal, such as conspiracy and obstruction of justice, Rothstein said.

After resigning from the bars of California and the U.S. Supreme Court, Nixon offered his resignation from the New York state bar as well. But a panel of state appellate judges voted, 4 to 1, to reject his resignation in favor of ordering him formally disbarred.

Los Angeles attorney Ellen Pansky, who is past president of the Assn. of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, a national organization specializing in legal ethics, suggested that Clinton “has several lines of defense, including the fact that the Senate, acting as a trial court,” acquitted him last year of perjury and obstruction of justice charges by the House.

However, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and close observer of the presidency, said that Clinton might be wise to avoid disbarment by offering to surrender his law license.

“A bar license represents something more than a license to practice,” Turley said. “It represents a certain commitment to uphold the principles of legal process. The president’s conduct is wholly incompatible with the role of an attorney.”