Prosecutor, defense lawyer should be disbarred

Both former prosecutor Marc Anthony Guillory and defense counsel Lorna Patton Brown abused their office. Mr. Guillory put the public at risk repeatedly by his drunken driving and tried to escape responsibility by offering his assistant DA’s card; one wonders how many police officers let him go instead of arresting him. As for Ms. Brown, she put the lives of the witnesses in her case at risk. In fact, she risked another Marin Courthouse shooting.

Both ought to lose their licenses permanently. The margin for mercy is small to vanishing when lives have been put at risk so profligately and callously by a person abusing their public office. Let them take up another line of work.

David D. Salmon
Zenia, Calif.

Court of Appeal changes footnote in decision against law firm

The article by Ms. Diane Karpman in the March 2014 California Bar Journal was incomplete in several respects. For the benefit of any readers who became alarmed at Ms. Karpman's comments about the potentially infinite time limitation for the maintenance of records concerning client settlements and trust account disbursements and accountings, the 2nd District Court of Appeal on Feb. 27, 2014 modified footnote 8 of its original opinion in denying the defendants' petition for rehearing in Prakashpalan v. Engstrom, Lipscomb & Lack (No. B 244236), at page 16 of the slip opinion.

The court deleted the following language in reference to Rules of Professional Conduct, rule 4-100(B)(3): “We do not read that rule to impose an outside limit on the amount of time an attorney must keep accounting records.”

The footnote now reads: “Although Rules of Professional Conduct, rule 4-100(B)(3) specifies that such accountings shall be kept for a minimum of ‘five years,’ the rule does not obviate a fiduciary’s duty to provide an accounting.”

David W. Evans
San Francisco

Editor’s note: The footnote was modified after the Bar Journal’s publication deadline.