Dan Grant

Dear Legal Profession: How Can We Respect And Trust You When You Police Yourself Like THIS?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Justice_broken3

I’ve been defending my profession a lot here lately, but I also recognize that there is a very good reason why such incidents as the surprisingly generous sentence in the “Affluenza” case and the drug court judge who suffered an alcoholic relapse on the bench are wrongly interpreted as proof of inequities and double standards in the legal system. The reason is that those who oversee the system do inexplicable things that appear to the outside world as not only a lack of integrity but also the apparent inability to realize how such conduct undermines the public trust.

Both of these recent news stories are cases in point:

I. The Imaginary Government Lawyer

In 2012, the Nebraska state supreme court disbarred lawyer David Walocha for not paying his bar dues and proceeding to practice law for 13 years with a suspended license. At the end of 2013, the District of Columbia Bar had to decide what to do with former Justice Department attorney Laura Heiser, who practiced 21 years with a suspended license in the District. What was her punishment? She received an informal admonition, which is the least severe form of disciplinary action.  Continue reading →

Meet the Grants!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Hmmm…I wonder who’ll play Jennifer in the Lifetime movie?

If this developing story from Seattle was a Lifetime Network movie, I would regard it as proof positive that LMN was running out of plausible plots. Since it appears to be real, I regard it as proof positive that life is running out of plausible plots.

Meet the Grants. They make fun couple David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell look like Mike and Carol Brady.  Described as a Seattle “power couple”, he’s a successful lawyer, and she’s city prosecutor. He’s also an accused serial rapist.

Dan Grant faces seven charges of raping Chinese women working as massage therapists, and another charge for first-degree burglary. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. The chances that there is sufficient evidence to charge a Seattle lawyer as a serial rapist and that the evidence is nonetheless erroneous are slim, as are the chances that the police would charge the husband of a prosecutor without an air-tight case. Still, the word alleged needs to be attached to all of this. This isn’t just alleged, however: a recently released search warrant shows that prosecutor Jennifer Grant moved her husband’s SUV from in front of the massage parlor where he allegedly raped one of the Chinese women to a location far away from both the parlor and the Grants’ home. Gee, thanks, honey! Now why would she do that? The Good Wife Prosecutor swears that she took no evidence from the SUV except a garage key card, but a search warrant affidavit indicates that police believed that the vehicle contained a knife, condom wrappers, phony police ID and DNA. Continue reading →