The California Supreme
Court yesterday ordered that a prominent Beverly Hills attorney be disbarred for filing a
stream of disqualification motions and other papers containing what the State Bar Court found to be false and
frivolous charges regarding members of the state bench. 

The high court, at its
weekly conference in San
Francisco,
voted 6-0 to deny review and to adopt the State Bar Court’s recommendation that Richard I. Fine
lose his license to practice law.  Justice Kathryn M. Werdegar was absent and
did not participate. 

Honn was declared
involuntarily inactive in October 2007 after Hearing Judge Richard Honn said
Fine’s “remarkable academic and professional background” as a leading antitrust
and taxpayer rights lawyer did not justify his “improper and vindictive
reactions” to rulings of Commissioner Bruce Mitchell and other judicial
officers. 

‘Never-Ending Attack’

The hearing judge said
Fine “engaged in what amounts to an almost never-ending attack on anyone
(including attorneys and judicial officers) who disagreed with him or otherwise
got in his way.”  Fine, Honn said, “kept digging himself into deeper and deeper
problems” and failed “to appreciate the harm he has imposed on so many people
and on the court system.” 

Fine, the onetime head
of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s antitrust unit and counsel for the
plaintiffs in a number of highly publicized class actions and taxpayer suits,
has blamed his troubles on state judges and other officials whom he accuses of
retaliating against him for his years of challenges to the benefits paid to Los
Angeles Superior Court judges by the county. 

Fine claims that judges
who receive the benefits have a conflict of interest in any case involving the
county, and that they have, over the years, improperly failed to disclose the
conflict and to disqualify themselves from cases to which the county is a
party. 

The Court of Appeal last
year ruled in Sturgeon v. County of Los Angeles that the benefits are
unconstitutional because they have not been authorized by the Legislature.  The
court did not say that judges who have been receiving the benefits had a
conflict of interest as contended by Fine, but Fine—who was not involved in the
Sturgeon case—said the decision vindicated him. 

Fine told the MetNews he
intends to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court based on what he said are
violations of his constitutional rights to free speech and due process of law. 
He has argued, among other things, that Honn had an undisclosed conflict of
interest because the disciplinary charges stemmed from his battle with the
county, which gives $30,000 a year to Special Olympics of Southern California,
on whose board Honn serves. 

Honn’s participation in
the case violates the “implicit right to honest services” and should be
investigated as a violation of federal fraud statutes, Fine said. 

Federal Suit

The now-disbarred lawyer
is also suing the State Bar in federal court, arguing that the statute that
permits disbarment for acts of moral turpitude not amounting to crimes violated
the Due Process Clause.  That suit, pending before Judge Dale Fisher in the U.S.
District Court for the Central District of California, has been on hold pending
the outcome of the State Bar proceedings, Fine said. 

“This is political
payback for my having exposed the corruption in the judicial system,” Fine said
yesterday. “.... I would have to question whether the California Supreme Court
....even read the papers....This is on one of the greater travesties of
justice...They want to take the lawyer who has saved the taxpayers more than $1
billion dollars and put him out of the bar when they have done nothing about
the corruption in the judicial system.” 

He added that there is
“not one scintilla of substantive evidence” that he has violated ethics rules. 

In other conference
action, the justices:

•Left standing a ruling
by Div.  Five of this district’s Court of Appeal, which threw out a $1.5 million
verdict in favor of a former Los Angeles deputy city attorney who was
discharged after angrily suggesting to a clerk that then-Los Angeles Superior
Court Commissioner (now Judge) Joseph Biderman “would have to answer to the
Creator” for a judicial ruling which she opposed. 

The panel ruled in Magnandonovan
v. City of Los Angeles, B192892, that the hostile language directed at Biderman
was a legitimate nondiscriminatory reason to discharge Lynn Magnandonovan, and
that her pretext evidence was insufficient as a matter of law to support a
reasonable inference of intentional retaliation. 

Magnandonovan admitted to
making the offending comment to Biderman’s court clerk after Biderman took Magnandonovan’s
motion to revoke a convicted child molester’s probation off calendar when Magnandonovan
failed to timely appear for the hearing.  Biderman testified that he understood Magnandonovan’s
remarks as a “veiled reference” to his homosexuality, and that he “felt very
personally insulted”; “was very upset about it”; and “was in shock about the
whole thing.” 

While allowing the
ruling to stand, the high court declined to order publication of the Court of
Appeal opinion. 

•Declined to review a
ruling by the First District’s Div.  Four that the State Bar’s subrogation
rights against an attorney whose clients were reimbursed by the Client Security
Fund are not limited to the amount of a litigation settlement between the
lawyer and the clients.  The case is State Bar of California v. Statile (2008)168 Cal. App.4th 650. 

•Agreed to decide whether police violated the
Fourth Amendment when they entered a mentally disordered man’s home to
confiscate his gun after taking him into custody outside for posing a danger to
others. 

The Third District Court
of Appeal ruled last October in People v. Sweig (2008) 167 Cal. App.4th 1145, said there was no
constitutional authority for the warrantless entry in the absence of exigent
circumstances.  The panel rejected the prosecution’s argument that the entry was
justified under the “community caretaking exception” to the Fourth Amendment.