Court Opinion

ID: 3529789
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2016-07-05 22:42:15.109069+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:29:33.285741
License: Public Domain

We hereby adopt the report, finding of facts, and conclusions of law of our Special Commissioner heretofore filed herein, as and for the opinion of this court, and order the license of respondent Verne Lacy to practice law in the State of Missouri revoked, with costs assessed against respondent.
We take this occasion to reaffirm what we said in In re H____ S____, 69 S.W.2d 325:
". . . while a lawyer is not a public officer in the constitutional or statutory sense of the term, he is an officer of the court, and, as such, owes a definite obligation to the public as a whole in the matter *Page 93 
of the proper administration of justice. His license to engage in the practice of the law is his, not of right, but as a privilege granted him by the State, which comes to him burdened with conditions of subsequent good behavior and professional integrity, and sets him and his profession apart from the general public upon a high and dignified plane which is circumscribed by the requirements of good moral character and special qualifications which are prerequisites to admission to the bar.
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And in a more special and personal way it is his continuing duty to maintain the high purposes and functions of both bench and bar as instruments of fair dealing between man and men. As an officer of the court he is, like the court itself, an agency or instrument to advance the ends of justice. He serves as a priest in the temple of justice, and if he be false to his vows, then justice itself is imperiled, if not entirely thwarted. He has the property, and sometimes the liberty and the very life, of his client in his safe-keeping; and so jealously does the law regard the relation of attorney and client that it puts communications between the two in much the same privilege category as communications between husband and wife. The future of the nation depends very largely upon the maintenance of justice pure and undefiled; and the conduct of the lawyer must support and create confidence in the public mind in the administration of justice, and not be of a character to bring reproach upon the legal profession or to alienate the favorable opinion which the public should entertain concerning it. Failing in this, it is not only within the power, but it is the duty, of the court to remove the lawyer who is false to his trust from the ranks of the profession to the end that the courts, the administration of justice, and the public at large may be protected against him."