Court Opinion

ID: 9647858
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 13:53:14.811346+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:54.231168
License: Public Domain

CLIFFORD, J.,
dissenting.
Distasteful as I find the exercise to be, I record my disagreement with the Court’s assessment of the appropriate discipline.
Respondent submitted what purported to be a witness’s statement in support of his own personal-injury claim, then repeatedly lied under oath about the authorship of that statement and the circumstances of its preparation, knowingly and intentionally perpetuated his lie for about four years, and to this day cannot bring himself to acknowledge that his blatant falsehoods amount to any more than “an immaterial misrepresentation that took place once in the course of a two hundred page deposition * * For me the question is whether this Court can tolerate as a member of our honorable profession one who has been shown by clear and convincing evidence to be a calculating, self-serving liar. The answer is “no.” I would disbar.
I
Respondent claimed personal injuries as the result of an escalator accident in April 1980, witnessed by his late wife (Mrs. Lunn died in August 1980) and his seventeen-year-old son. He sued both the manufacturer of the escalator and the casino resort in which it was located. As part of the discovery process defendants called respondent to testify under oath on oral depositions. In the course of those proceedings he was shown *171a statement purportedly signed by his wife, which respondent had previously furnished to the insurance carrier for one of the defendants. After testifying that in the statement his wife had “just put down, you know, her recollection” of how the escalator had malfunctioned, respondent described the circumstances under which the statement had been prepared:
Q. Mr. Lunn, what’s been marked W-l, that is your wife’s statement—
A. Yeah.
Q. —she wrote out that out [sic]; is that correct?
A. Yeah.
Q. And you didn’t suggest any facts to her; is that correct?
A. I don’t really remember. All I know, it was her recollection of what occurred.
Q. What did you tell her was important to include in the statement?
A. As to what happened and, you know, where — where we were and why we were there and where we were coming from and basically that was it, I guess, what happened.
Q. Has your — had your wife written any other statement to anyone concerning this incident?
A. Not to the best of my knowledge.
Q. Does she have any written notes to herself or written form of any kind setting forth her recollection of what occurred, aside from what’s been marked as W-l?
A. I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Q. At the time of this incident was your wife in any manner ill that you were aware of?
A. No, she died suddenly.
Q. So she was not suffering from anything that everybody knew about at the time of this incident?
A. No, she was not under any disability.
In a more pointed line of inquiry defense counsel asked, with unmistakable clarity, whether respondent’s wife had “physically” written the statement herself:
Q. Okay. Let me ask you first about W-l, which is a two-page statement. Did Sylvia herself write that out, sir, physically write it out? Not did she dictate that to somebody or did she tell somebody else and they wrote it down. Did she physically write that?
A. Well, to the best of my recollection, you know, as I’ve indicated to you, this was written, signed by my wife in our dining room after we discussed, you *172know, preparing some sort of a memo or statement or whatever concerning this incident.
Q. Okay. Whose idea was it to prepare such memos?
A. Mine.
Q. Let me ask you this: you, of course, were married to your wife for a great number of years. Are you familiar with her handwriting?
A. Yes.
Q. Is that her handwriting on W-l?
A. As I’ve testified, yes.
It is apparent that as the litigation progressed, respondent could not help but realize that defendants suspected some problem with Sylvia Lunn’s statement. In June 1983 defendants secured a court order compelling respondent to furnish “cancelled personal checks from March, April and May of 1980 signed by Mrs. Lunn — Sylvia Lunn.” When respondent failed to comply with that order, after six weeks, defendant obtained another order, which expressly provided that if respondent failed to hand over the checks bearing his wife’s signature, his Complaint would be dismissed. Two months after the date of that order respondent took a voluntary dismissal of his lawsuit, with prejudice — a lawsuit in which he claimed painful and disabling permanent injuries that as of October 1982, the date of answers to interrogatories, had caused about $2900 in medical expenses, a lawsuit for which an offer of settlement remained and was rejected at the time of the dismissal (“I dismissed my case even though I was offered some money at that time. I didn’t want it.”).
Had not one of the defense counsel brought the foregoing circumstances to the attention of the Camden County Prosecutor’s office, the matter might have ended there. But fortunately for the integrity of the system, it did not. The efforts of the law-enforcement authorities produced respondent’s written stipulation that when he gave deposition testimony in his lawsuit, he “knew that [he] had written the body of, and signed the name of Sylvia P. Lunn” to, the statement that he had sixteen months previously sworn was written and signed by his wife. *173The prosecutor’s office submitted the stipulation to the ethics authorities, who initiated these proceedings.
When confronted with the statement at the District Ethics Committee (DEC) hearing, respondent admitted that he had written it and signed his wife’s name to it. He thereupon volunteered the explanation that “I did it when she asked me to and she was having problems writing a statement herself.” The “problems,” he explained, were connected with his wife’s “hypoglycemia and her tendency to shake and get shook up and nervous,” even though at his earlier deposition testimony he had averred that at the time of the escalator accident (three days preceding the preparation of the statement) Mrs. Lunn “was not under any disability.” Respondent told the DEC that he had intended to have what he had written typed in his office, after which he would have his wife sign it, but he did not have the opportunity to do so.
II
Based on the foregoing, the Disciplinary Review Board (DRB) agreed with the DEC’S conclusions finding respondent guilty of unethical conduct, citing specifically DR s 1-102(A)(4), (5), and (6). The DRB’s reason for recommending a suspension of one year is, however, unconvincing: that respondent’s conduct was “not as egregious” as that of the respondent in In re McNally, 81 N.J. 304, 406 A.2d 1315 (1979), in which this Court suspended McNally for two years for forging a sheriff’s name to a deed of foreclosure and fraudulently witnessing the instrument. After first observing that “[o]rdinarily [McNally’s] conduct would call for the severest kind of discipline,” id. at 305, 406 A.2d 1315, we imposed the suspension because of mitigating circumstances: McNally panicked when confronted with a situation beyond his capabilities, he sought no personal profit or gain from his actions other than retention of his employment, he cooperated with the ethics authorities, and his remorse was clear. Id. at 306, 406 A.2d 1315.
*174In sharp contrast to McNally, this respondent concocted a lie for personal gain, persisted in perpetuating that lie in sworn testimony designed to advance his own interests, and has consistently failed to acknowledge the magnitude of his professional dereliction, choosing instead to dissemble, to find excuses where there are none. The circumstances are much closer to those in In re Edson, 108 N.J. 464, 530 A.2d 1246 (1987), in which we disbarred an attorney who had counselled his client to fabricate a defense to a driving-while-intoxicated charge on the basis of material facts that the respondent knew to be false, permitted the client to perjure himself in court, and himself lied to the prosecuting attorney.
Perhaps most distressing is respondent’s lawyer’s assertion at oral argument before us that respondent’s “lie or group of lies * * * really in the long run hurt no one”; and that lying to a court is “not that severe a violation of any of our rules of conduct or anything else”; and, perhaps most astonishing, “[i]t goes on every day in every court and we would be naive and hiding our heads in the sand if we didn’t say that.” All three assertions are absurd. The first is outrageous, the second exasperating, the third insulting, and none is accurate.
As we observed in Edson, supra, the members of this Court, all practicing lawyers before we became judges, have encountered in our professional experience “all kinds of lawyers— most very good, some perhaps indifferent, and a mere handful bad.” 108 N.J. at 472, 530 A.2d 1246. Although it is probably unseemly as well as unwise to recite in a judicial opinion one’s own personal experiences, I take the liberty of observing that during two decades spent trying eases in every county courthouse save two in this state, I could count on my fingers the lawyers capable of the kind of mendacity practiced by this respondent. Everybody knew them, everybody took special precautions in dealing with them, and eventually the ethics system, primitive then by comparison with today’s, caught up with most of them. The suggestion that respondent’s conduct hurt no one overlooks the fact that the vast majority of lawyers *175in this state are decent, trustworthy professionals. When one of their own misbehaves, that misconduct touches them all. When one of their own poisons the wellspring of justice, as this respondent has done, the taint reaches even the best, just as a judge’s failure to act within the necessary restrictions on his or her public conduct casts a shadow on the entire judiciary.
Having taken an oath to tell the truth, respondent lied, for no reason other than to serve his own interest. In concluding that a period of suspension constitutes an adequate response to that transgression, the Court not only misappraises the gravity of respondent’s misconduct but also trivializes the significance of the oath itself. The extent to which the integrity of our system of justice, particularly the adversary system, depends on the sanctity of the oath cannot be underestimated. We rely on people to tell the truth. Some lie. When discovered, they are subject to punishment. This Court’s indulgent treatment of lying under oath by an officer of the court for his own selfish purposes is entirely out of step with our dedication to basic principles of justice and with our oft-proclaimed goal of assuring that members of the bar adhere to the highest professional standards.
The Court would do well to recall, as it did in In re Edson, supra, the admonition that lawyers
must possess a certain set of traits — honesty and truthfulness, trustworthiness and responsibility, and a professional commitment to the judicial process and the administration of justice. Those personal characteristics are required to ensure that lawyers will serve both their clients and the administration of justice honorably and responsibly.
[ 108 N.J. at 473, 630 A.2d 1246 (quoting Application of Matthews, 94 N.J. 59, 77, 462 A.2d 165 (1983)). ]
Some stains fade and disappear over time. Others, too deep, too penetrating, too lasting to be eradicated by any but the most drastic means, must be cut from the cloth. Because I conclude that respondent failed so abysmally to meet the demands of the profession and appears even now not to understand those demands, I vote to disbar.
*176For suspension — Chief Justice WILENTZ and Justices HANDLER, POLLOCK, O’HERN, GARIBALDI and STEIN — 6.
For disbarment — Justice CLIFFORD — 1.