Court Opinion

ID: 9667977
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:59:30.49269+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:42.100153
License: Public Domain

ROBERTSON, Judge,
concurring and concurring in result.
I concur in all but part II of the Court’s opinion. I do not join the Court’s opinion in full because I harbor grave reservations about the wisdom of this Court imposing disciplinary sanctions resulting in the suspension of the member of the Bar based in part on statements made in documents filed with the Court.
This case is substantially different than in In re Westfall, 808 S.W.2d 829 (Mo. banc 1991). In Westfall, the attorney charged with violating the canons of professional conduct made statements questioning the integrity of judges to the press for the purpose of communicating those views to the public at large. In this case, Mr. Howard did not disseminate his views of any judge to the public generally or with the intent that they reach the public generally. Instead, he committed his accusations about the judge to a written document and filed that document with the very judge against whom he made the accusations.
Even if the Court is correct that the First Amendment does not protect recklessly false statements, I do not believe that such statements filed in the manner with which Mr. Howard filed them ought to be the subject of disciplinary sanctions.
If offended by words written in documents filed with a court, that court has the authority to find the author of the words guilty of contempt and impose sanctions. Absent a continuing pattern of this sort of behavior, I believe that contempt is the far preferable procedure to redress Mr. Howard’s conduct contained in written documents filed with the court than is the disciplinary process. See In re Coe, 903 S.W.2d. 916, 919 (Mo. banc 1995) (Robertson, J., concurring in result) (“Given [the] powers [to impose contempt sanctions] resident in any trial court, I do not believe that a suspension from practice is appropriate absent egregious, continuous, long-standing, habitual and contumacious behavior.”)
The charges filed against Mr. Howard relating to sexual misconduct are sufficiently egregious and proven sufficiently well to warrant his suspension from the practice of law. I concur fully in the Court’s imposition of that sanction on the basis of the sexual misconduct alone.