Court Opinion

ID: 9794235
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:01:45.380608+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:13:13.974822
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Justice,
dissenting.
In this bar prosecution for professional misconduct, the court undertakes a sua sponte assessment of the disciplinary process conducted against the respondent-lawyer and concludes that it falls short of meeting the minimum standards of fairness.
The court’s opinion, which resolves fundamental-law issues that are unnecessary for the disposition of this case, offends two of the cardinal rules governing constitutional adjudication: never anticipate a constitutional question in advance of the necessity of deciding it and never formulate a norm of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied.1
I must hence recede from today’s pronouncement of purely gratuitous constitutional jurisprudence whose norms, even if correct in abstracto, are grossly ill-fitted for application to this proceeding’s posture.
All of the procedural defects discussed in the court’s opinion went unchallenged, both below and here.2 None has been revealed as having prejudiced the truth-finding process before the Professional Responsibility Tribunal’s panel. Forgotten or abandoned by the court is the time-honored principle of harmless error that would withhold vitiating consequences from a constitutional violation which did not deprive one of a fair hearing.3
While a Professional Responsibility Tribunal’s findings are subject to de novo review,4 the process before it is not free from the strictures that generally govern advocacy in the adversary common-law tradition of forensic combat. Fundamental fairness in litigation process cannot be afforded to the parties opponent except within a framework of orderly procedure. No area of the law may lay claim to exemption from the range of its cardinal requirements — not even bar discipline.5 Because the respondent neither preserved nor tendered any of the issues reached for resolution by today’s pronouncement, the court’s response to his plea is purely advisory and academic.
On de novo review of the entire record, I would adopt, as I believe I must, the unassailed factual findings of the Professional Responsibility Tribunal’s panel and would conclude that the respondent’s professional misconduct, followed by his prolonged recalcitrance and dilatory tactics, warrants a suspension from legal practice for not less than six months, which period should begin from the effective date of the court’s decision.

. In re Snyder, 472 U.S. 634, 105 S.Ct. 2874, 86 L.Ed.2d 504 [1985] and Brockett v. Spokane Arcades, Inc., 472 U.S. 491, 105 S.Ct. 2794, 86 L.Ed.2d 394 [1986],

. Although there is scant reference in respondent’s brief to the Professional Responsibility Tribunal panel's refusal to let him "reopen" and to his lost "opportunity to speak," his plea to this court is not for corrective relief from the Bar’s tainted process, but rather for reduction of disciplinary sanction to a private reprimand.

. United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667, 677, 105 S.Ct. 3375, 3381, 87 L.Ed.2d 481 [1985],

. State, ex rel., Okl. Bar Ass'n v. Raskin, Okl., 642 P.2d 262, 266 [1982],

. Pryse Monument Co. v. District Court, etc., Okl., 595 P.2d 435, 438 [1979].