The Arkansas Supreme Court’s Office of Professional Conduct will not file a formal complaint against Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. In a letter to me dated July 7, Stark Ligon, the committee’s executive director, wrote that the committee “has no authority to review the discretionary actions of appointed or elected officials.” (Underline his.)
Ligon’s letter was in response to one I sent the committee in May, in which I questioned the propriety of McDaniel’s continued support for the convictions of Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, despite evidence (which McDaniel does not dispute) that their trial was marred by juror misconduct. Ligon wrote that the information I provided was “carefully reviewed by at least two staff attorneys,” who found that “there does not appear to be a sufficient basis for a formal complaint under the committee’s limited authority.”
Elsewhere, Ligon explained: “The authority of the committee is limited to those matters addressed by the Model Rules which have been adopted by the Arkansas Supreme Court as the standard of conduct for Arkansas lawyers.” He said the committee is “restricted to the consideration of those matters specifically addressed” by the rules.
Ligon did not cite a court ruling or section of the rules that bars the committee from reviewing the discretionary actions of appointed or elected officials. In responding to Ligon today, I asked him to let me know where that limitation is articulated.
In my complaint, I asked the committee to investigate whether McDaniel and Deputy Attorney General David R. Raupp had violated the court’s rules of professional conduct “by supporting jury verdicts that were obtained by processes that violated the defendants’ constitutional rights.” I wrote that I assumed that the rules did not sanction “actions that knowingly deprive a citizen of ‘life, liberty or property without due process of law.’”
Quoting a part of the rules that state that lawyers “must strive to avoid not only professional impropriety, but also the appearance of impropriety,” I had outlined my belief that the actions of the attorney general’s office in this regard presented “not just the appearance of impropriety, but impropriety itself.”
Though I told Ligon I would not appeal the committee’s decision, I took the opportunity to observe that McDaniel does not appear to be exercising much discretion at all with regard to appeals and that, to the contrary, he seems convinced that any prosecutor who has prevailed at a trial is right. To support this view, I quoted the “confidence” the attorney general claimed in a recent supreme court filing regarding Echols “that the Arkansas criminal-justice system does not convict the innocent.”
With regard to Echols and Baldwin, I concluded: “If these men are someday freed, I will be one of many wondering how many years they spent in prison unnecessarily because the attorney general chose to interpret his duty as one of representing the interests of a state prosecuting attorney rather than, as the [Arkansas] constitution requires, defending ‘the interests of the state.’”
On a related note: After I reported on my complaints to the committee on this blog, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette quoted Ligon as saying that I could be held in contempt of court—a criminal charge—for violating the committee’s confidentiality requirements for attorneys. However, his recent letter did not mention that alleged crime.
