Florida lawyer Albert V. Medina, who practices in Boca Raton, had his law license suspended for 10 days, and you’ll never guess why.
Medina shot his brother in the arm while fooling around with a gun, pointing it at his brother and pulling the trigger. The brothers said that they engaged in this “horseplay” frequently: the wounded brother said his sibling had aimed an unloaded pistol at him and pulled the trigger ten times before, as a joke. This time, however, it was loaded.
The brother signed an affidavit affirming that the incident was unintentional, so the criminal case was resolved by Medina’s pleading guilty to the misdemeanor offense of culpable negligence causing injury to another. Medina has been a member of the bar since 2014 with no prior ethics offenses.
I don’t care. The idea of the legal discipline system is to protect the public from lawyers who are demonstrably untrustworthy or unfit to practice law for other reasons. Morons are unfit to practice law, and you can’t fix stupid. What is this guy, eleven years old? Anyone who aims guns at others “as a joke” and pulls the trigger shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects, much less with the legal affairs of members of the public.
Absent a successful brain transplant, Albert V. Medina should have been disbarred.
Ethics Alarms 
A basic and important rule of gun safety, perhaps the preeminent rule, is that you should never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Playing around with a gun in the fashion that Medina did shows a disturbing lack of gun safety in particular, but of the principal normalization of deviance in particular.
To delve into a little bit of brain science, in following the cognitive-emotive-behavioral model, we start with a desire. Perhaps in Medina’s case, it was simply to have fun. But how would he possibly conclude pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun is fun?
There are a large variety of ways we can try to satisfy our desires. In the case of hunger, we could seek satiation from a myriad of venues. In the case seeking stress relief, we could seek out a movie, a game, exercise, or any of a host of other options. But there are options we can choose from that are unhealthy, dangerous, or even illegal. When presented with all these options, our brains experience a byplay between thought and feeling. Does this option satisfy? The emotions clamor for a particular avenue, and cognition weighs the risks and benefits. If I eat a salad, I might not feel satiated, but if I eat a Hardee’s Monster Burger, I’ll be consuming far too many calories. But the salad may not be very tasty, and the Monster Burger is delicious. Whichever way I choose, my brain will record the success or failure of the endeavor, and the next time I am hungry, I will have a precedent to fall back on. They byplay between cognition and emotion in subsequent encounters proceeds much more quickly. The Monster Burger was indeed delicious, filled me up, and I didn’t seem to suffer any negative consequences. So the next time, my brain is patterned to lean toward the Monster Burger because of the positive experience.
Where we start down the road into trouble is when we consider objectively bad choices to satisfy our desires, and then suffer no consequences for it. The O-rings were problematic on the Challenger, but we had numerous successful launches without the O-rings failing, so we thought we could keep pushing the envelope (to the point that a traumatized four-year old bit another child in day care and hid under a table after having seen the Challenger explode on TV). Or I was able to sneak that pack of gum into my pocket and walk out of the store without getting caught, so I think I can keep shoplifting. Or I scared my brother by pointing an unloaded gun at him and pulled the trigger, and the look on his face satisfied my desire for a good laugh from a prank well-played, leading me to believe I could keep pulling that prank.
Eventually, because our brains are wired to handle routine automatically, the cognition, which is the only internal factor that can put the brakes on deviant behavior, is cut out of the process. We choose the objectively bad behavior so many times without suffering any notable consequences that we jump straight from having a desire to acting in that deviant fashion. When people say they weren’t thinking when they did something wrong and bad consequences occurred, they aren’t lying, or at least are not lying about that particular instance. Thinking literally has been cut out of the process.
Often enough, it is a bad consequence that breaks us out of the cycle. That is why it takes headline-screaming accidents in industry to drive a safer culture. People don’t tend to examine the blast-resistance of office space until an explosion levels a bunch of flimsy trailer-offices and kills the occupants (see the BP Isomerization Unit explosion from 2005). That is why suffering legal punishment is so important for fighting crime, because the process of arrest, arraignment, trial, conviction, sentencing, and incarceration is so traumatic, so painful, that it gives the cognition ammunition to re-enter the process. That doesn’t mean that it will. It doesn’t mean that the cognition will win out, either. Ask addicts how much fear of another jail sentence overrides their desire for another fix when their desire is so intense that they would do anything to make that discomfort go away. But with punishment, reflection, and a willingness to engage the process, one can eventually break the cycle. Small bad habits are easier to break than addictions, but even addictions can be successfully fought.
I say all this to conclude that perhaps Medina, who according to the article had no prior ethics violations, can be given a second chance. When we fall into these deviance traps, and I assume he has since he’s pulled this stupid stunt ten times or more prior to this unintended discharge, it doesn’t necessarily compromise us in every aspect of our lives. He may be a very competent lawyer, and if he demonstrates (not through words, but actions) that he is taking this lesson to heart and looking at other ways he might be doing something stupid with then intent to fix them, then I would not want to see him utterly disbarred.
A second unethical stunt, though, would indicate a much deeper issue, and in that case, I would agree that disbarring would be earned, and he needs to get his life back under control.
COTD, Ryan. Superb, Thank-you.
Thanks, Jack!
In other news, I’m trying to write an essay to answer your Friday’s call, but my excuse for not having one yet is that all last week we were packing up our house and then driving back to Wyoming. And now that we’re back in Wyoming, house-hunting is now on the agenda. Still, I hope to have something worthwhile soon.
Crazy Cuban.