Tainted Report Damages Court’s Credibility

The fact that South Carolina’s highest court engaged in a deliberate effort to manipulate the results of last year’s American Bar Association (ABA) report is old news … much like the Court’s deliberate effort to manipulate the results of the S.C. Bar Exam in late 2007.

We broke both of these stories, the mainstream press picked up on them and let’s face it … they were huge public relations embarrassments for Chief Justice Jean Toal.

We also broke the story of the Court’s controversial attorney discipline system, which along with the bar exam scam prompted several lawmakers to introduce legislation last year stripping the Court of these oversight functions.

Needless to say, the Court has made defeating this legislation the top priority of its taxpayer-funded lobbyists ever since the proposal introduced at the beginning of the 2008 session.

Of course, we never suspected that the ABA may have been complicit in a rigged review of the state’s attorney discipline system -or at least as negligent as they were in performing their duties.

This is the nation’s preeminent legal organization, after all, an association that literally oozes with credibility.

Well, it won’t for long, if these accusations hold true.

A South Carolina lawmaker investigating the Court has provided FITS with a copy of an explosive report that outlines serious ethical lapses on the part of both the Court and the ABA review team in the conduct and findings of the investigations.

The report, excerpts of which are published here for the first time, pulls no punches.

“Inaccurate descriptions and a deceptive analysis of the present South Carolina judicial and attorney discipline systems within this ABA consultation team’s report represent a breach of the ABA team’s duty to the Supreme Court of South Carolina, South Carolina Bar and public of South Carolina,” the report states.

Specifically, the ABA team is accused of intentionally neglecting relevant documents, ignoring key witnesses and omitting unflattering aspects of our state’s attorney discipline system in order to reach the predefined conclusion that the Court should maintain its current corrupt hold over the profession.

“In ratifying and endorsing an attorney discipline system based on the sole discretion of the South Carolina Chief Justice and her four associate justices, void of any equitable discovery process or the U.S. Constitution protections of due process and equal protection, the six members of the ABA team have also breached their duties to the U.S. Constitution and the ABA Constitution,” the report continues.

Additionally, there appear to be serious ethical problems with some of the ABA reviewers, including one judge from New Mexico who was forced to resign from his post after multiple allegations of corruption and sexual harassment.

If you recall, the ABA report was never intended to be made public – it was to be for the Court’s eyes only.

Chief Justice Toal and her staff received a draft of the ABA review in July of 2008, but felt it was not sufficiently flattering.

Accordingly, the ABA gave the Court several months to “review” the document before it was released publicly last September.

Sources say that Toal herself personally rewrote several of the sections she was most displeased with.

Needless to say, the fact that lawmakers are aware of this level of interference by the Court – and this degree of negligence by the ABA – will make it very difficult for Toal to stand before a joint session of the legislature later this month and claim that judicial branch regulation of the legal profession has been exonerated.

If anything, the budding controversy surrounding this report hangs an even darker cloud of suspicion over the Court’s conduct, because it shows the lengths to which Toal and her cronies will go to cover up their bad behavior.

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