Namaste: If Not Now, When? Chapter 10 Whistleblowing Along The Path With Heart (Part 2)

Chapter 10 (Part 2)

Whistleblowing Along The Path With Heart

We also were concerned that the American Bar Association (ABA) would never accredit our school as long as the dean was connected with it because we had just learned that the ABA had denied us provisional accreditation. Our law library, most of which was stored out of sight in boxes in a back room in the library, did not comply with minimum ABA requirements and the dean had misrepresented what we had to the ABA in our application for accreditation. He also had lied to us about what was packed-up awaiting new floor space and shelving. We were shocked by this news as we expected to receive provisional accreditation from the ABA. Indeed, the ABA site-visit team gave our faculty its highest rating.

The judge wrote a confidential letter to the chairman of the council expressing our concerns and the chairman immediately sent the dean a copy. Enraged by our discovery of his criminal activities, the dean promptly fired us and called a news conference in which he denied all wrongdoing. He also produced affidavits from several students who praised him for his inspirational leadership and denied that there were any problems at the school. Calling us disgruntled law professors, he dismissed our claims as false allegations motivated by a desire to destroy the value of the school in order to force him to sell it to us at a fire-sale price. Not surprisingly, the student affidavits upon which he relied to refute our allegations, were signed by students who had benefitted from his schemes. The local newspaper, which is owned by the chairman of the council, immediately lapsed into its best rendition of that old saw, he-said, she-said, and I hustled on down to the unemployment office to file my first claim.

Many of the students who had confided in us stepped up to defend us, and several weeks later the minority lawyer-shareholder filed a civil RICO and shareholder’s derivative action in federal court against the deans and their accountant. The judge persuaded an old friend, who is a lawyer, to represent the students and the case was underway with the good citizens of Paducah now hopelessly confused by the non-Pulitzer-Prize-winning staff of the local rag that serves as a newspaper.

After a considerable amount of public posturing and the usual breast-beating lawyer games associated with affairs of this nature during which the deans and their accountant continued to feign innocence while looting what remained of the school’s assets, the lawyers representing the deans and their accountant floated the ye-olde-fictitious-buyer ploy, in which they produced a so-called “serious buyer” with an equally serious offer, whose wife had suddenly inherited millions of dollars, to instill panic in our ranks and, not coincidentally, to jack-up the price to settle the case. The lawyer shareholder responded by slamming one of the lawyers representing the deans up against the wall during a settlement conference and the deans thereafter settled the case by signing over all of their worthless stock in the now bankrupt law school to the lawyer-shareholder in exchange for his promise to assume the school’s debts and pay off its creditors.

The lawyer, who now owned 100% of the worthless stock, created a new corporation that he called the Barkley Law School, Inc, and entered into a joint venture with a local pain-management physician to construct a new law library adjacent to the existing building. After assuring us that money would not be a problem because he had substantial financial backing from several local millionaires, he reinstated the judge and me with full back-pay, appointed the judge Interim Dean, and commenced a search to hire a new dean. At our first faculty meeting the judge announced that we had scheduled a return site visit for the ABA accreditation team in the fall and, assuming it went well, we would obtain ABA provisional accreditation in time for our charter class to graduate from an accredited school. Let the good times roll, we thought, as we returned to work almost three months to the day after we were fired.

The good times did not last long, however, because the financial backers never materialized and the new owner refused to pay the creditors of the now defunct American Justice School of Law. The judge submitted his resignation in disgust as he wanted no part of corporation shell games to stiff creditors whom he had promised to pay as the Interim Dean. I also would have quit, but I was in desperate financial straits after the three-month layoff and I did not want to abandon my students.

With great fanfare and speechifying at a no-alcohol party in town, the lawyer and the doctor announced that the school now would be known as the Barkley Law School and they unveiled the blueprints for the new library together with the blueprints to remodel the existing building. They also introduced the new dean whom the lawyer had hired to replace the judge.

At his first faculty meeting, the new dean announced that he had decided to cancel the fall site visit and he would not schedule a new visit before the spring of 2010. I immediately realized that meant that all of our current students would graduate before the school was accredited. He followed that announcement with a warning. He ordered us not to discuss his decision with anyone outside of a faculty meeting, including our marriage partners, and said he would fire anyone who leaked that information to the students.

I could not in good conscience abide by his decision, regardless of the consequences to myself. Such was my commitment to my students. So, I told them and urged them to transfer to an accredited law school as soon as possible and I promised to do everything within my power to help with that process. Sure enough, the new dean fired me as promised, but not before I assisted my students to transfer to other schools.

As I write this in July 2011, I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that most of my students have graduated from accredited law schools and passed their bar exams.

Welcome to the practice of law my friends. May you never forget the importance of following the path with heart.

Next up: Chapter 11 The Plot In Paducah Thickens: Crane-Station’s Arrest And Prosecution

Cross-Posted at Firedoglake and the Smirking Chimp.

If Not Now, When? is my intellectual property. I retain full rights to my own work. You may copy it and share it with others, but only if you credit me as the author. You may not sell or offer to sell it for any form of consideration. I retain full rights to publication.

My real name is Frederick Leatherman. I was a criminal-defense lawyer for 30 years specializing in death-penalty defense and forensics. I also was a law professor for three years.

Now I am a writer and I also haul scrap for a living in this insane land.

Heh.

Namaste

Masoninblue

Namaste: If Not Now, When? Chapter 10 Whistleblowing Along The Path With Heart (Part 1)

Chapter 10

Whistleblowing Along The Path With Heart

I moved to Kentucky with Crane Station in June, 2006, to start a new job as an associate professor of law teaching Criminal Law at the American Justice School of Law, a start-up law school in Paducah, KY owned by the Dean, the Assistant Dean, their accountant, and a respected Kentucky lawyer who had published a book on the Kentucky Rules of Evidence and court procedures.

I was hired because of my excellent national reputation as a skilled and effective trial lawyer handling complex litigation; my extensive death-penalty expertise, including representing serial killers, and my 2004 King County Washington Lawyer of the Year Award that I shared with my 7 co-counsel and supporting staff; my knowledge of forensics, particularly DNA testing; my reputation as an expert at cross-examining expert witnesses; and the successful efforts of Innocence Project Northwest, an organization of lawyers and law students that I co-founded at the University of Washington in Seattle with Professor Jackie McMurtrie.

In 2000, for example, the National Law Journal awarded IPNW its prestigious Pro Bono Award for its work in representing 17 innocent parents wrongfully convicted of sexually abusing their children in the Wenatchee Sex Ring cases, a series of witch-hunt prosecutions in the mid 1990s that were eerily reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials. Most of our clients had pled guilty on advice of court-appointed defense counsel who had failed to provide the minimal level of representation required by the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel Clause. Most of our clients also were developmentally disabled. Yet, we prevailed and freed all of our clients eventually despite daunting odds.

The school used my name and reputation to enhance its reputation in the community and to attract students. I specifically recall warning the deans at the conclusion of my job interview in February not to hire me, if they thought my commitment and aggressiveness in defending the due process rights of the poor, the mentally ill, minorities, and the marginalized would anger and provoke the powers that be in the community to take retaliatory action against the school.

“I don’t know them and y’all do. It’s your call,” I said.

A retired and highly respected former circuit court judge was teaching Criminal Procedure when I arrived at the school and, even though he is much more conservative than I am, we soon became good friends. Our students liked us because we had real-world experience and we balanced each other. Although we disagreed about many things, we definitely agreed on the importance of ethics, civil rights, and the Bill of Rights. We repeatedly stressed their importance to our students.

The Dean fired both of us without notice in November, 2007, after he discovered that we blew the whistle on his Ponzi scheme stealing student loan money.

We had about 200 students when I joined the faculty. The tuition was $15,000 per semester. The total per semester cost to attend the school, including books, assorted fees, and living expenses, was $30,000. Due to financial hardship, most of our students had to borrow that full amount from Student Loan Express, the only student loan lender who would lend money to students enrolled at an unaccredited law school. Student Loan Express would wire the full amount of each loan into the school’s bank account at the beginning of each semester. The school was entitled to keep the tuition, of course, but it also was supposed to issue a check to each student borrower for the balance of their loan within 48 hours of receiving the loan proceeds from Student Loan Express.

As the judge and I were to discover in confidence from many of our students over the course of the following academic year, the deans were withholding their loan money and doling it out a little at a time in exchange for a variety of unsavory favors or to grease a squeaky wheel. We also discovered that they were changing student grades after the professors turned them in to reward their favorites with higher grades or to punish their detractors with lower grades. This grade-fu was difficult for professors and students to detect because the school used an anonymous numbering system to grade exams and the professors were not provided with a list matching numbers to student names. The students only knew their own numbers. We turned in a list of student numbers and grades to the administration and it notified the students of their grades. As is typical of many law schools the final grade in the course was based solely on the final exam grade.

We figured out what was going on when some of our better students questioned their final grades. Upon reviewing a student’s final exam with the student, we discovered that in many cases the administration had recorded the student’s final grade (e.g., a B), when we had awarded the student a higher grade on the exam (e.g., an A). We also discovered that some students should not have been admitted to the law school because their LSAT scores were below the minimum threshold for admission and, with some overlap, others were receiving inflated grades in exchange for sex.

We were horrified by these stories and decided to protect our students and do something about the situation. I wanted to go to the United States Attorney’s Office but the judge was concerned that the school would be shut down, if we did that. He hoped to save the school and help the students by finding new owners to buy out the deans. He proposed we notify the Greater Paducah Area Development Council that owns the building and the property in Information Age Park where the law school is located. The members of the council are wealthy and he hoped to enlist some of them in an effort to buy out the Dean and Assistant Dean. He was optimistic because one of them owns the Sylvan Learning Center schools and several law schools.

To be continued.

Cross-Posted at Firedoglake and the Smirking Chimp.

If Not Now, When? is my intellectual property. I retain full rights to my own work. You may copy it and share it with others, but only if you credit me as the author. You may not sell or offer to sell it for any form of consideration. I retain full rights to publication.

My real name is Frederick Leatherman. I was a criminal-defense lawyer for 30 years specializing in death-penalty defense and forensics. I also was a law professor for three years.

Now I am a writer and I also haul scrap for a living in this insane land.

Heh.

Namaste

Masoninblue