Opinion ID: 796952
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Disbarment of Joseph F. Muto, Esq.

Text: 20 Joseph F. Muto, who served as Yang's attorney in the preparation of Yang's asylum application and at the hearing before the IJ, was disbarred from the practice of law in the State of New York by a Decision and Order of the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, on March 19, 2002. See In re Muto, 291 A.D.2d 188, 739 N.Y.S.2d 67 (N.Y.App.Div. 2002). The Departmental Disciplinary Committee (DDC) had served Muto with a Notice and Statement of Charges charging him with forty-three counts of professional misconduct related to his immigration law practice. Id. at 67-68. In confirming the findings of the DDC sustaining all forty-three counts and recommending disbarment after a hearing, the Appellate Division outlined the following background facts: 21 Since 1997, [Muto] has purported to specialize in representing illegal immigrants, chiefly from China, who seek political asylum in the United States. Through the testimony of several of [Muto]'s former clients and attorneys familiar with these matters, the DDC staff showed that these immigrants are brought into the United States by a series of middlemen known as snakeheads, who hand the immigrants over to an agency when they reach their destination in this country. The immigrant, lacking any knowledge of either the English language or the American legal system, then becomes completely dependent on his agency, which provides him with a job, a place to sleep, translators, and legal representation in immigration matters. The non-lawyer agency generally performs the actual legal work, and retains an attorney to front for it in the Immigration Court. An attorney retained by an agency to represent an illegal immigrant client generally has little or no contact with the client, exercises no control over the case, and serves at the pleasure of the agency which pays his fee. The Referee concluded that [Muto] lent himself to this insidious system. 22 Id. at 69. 23 The Appellate Division identified a number of specific instances of wrongdoing on the part of Muto, including, among other things, reliance on unsupervised non-lawyers to consult with clients and perform other legal work; undertaking representation without discussion with clients by means of a translator; undertaking representation without any meeting with clients at all; filing affidavits with the Court not signed by clients although purportedly signed by them; and failing to return original documents pertaining to his clients' asylum claims. Id. The Appellate Division made this pertinent observation in its decision: Notably, although [Muto]'s neglect resulted in the entry of orders of deportation against the clients who testified in this proceeding, those clients were able to salvage their cases by retaining, at higher cost, new attorneys who made successful motions to re-open. Id.