From burning down a church to a bikini-clad babe with machine gun, a best of 2009 series wouldn’t be complete without a list of lawyers who, shall we say, had some “lapses in judgment” over the past year.  Here’s who made our list:

Brian Schroeder

You’ve recently graduated from Harvard law.  You’ve got a lucrative job offer from a prestigious law firm in hand.  How do you celebrate? You get drunk and burn down a church, of course!  Schroeder’s night out of light-hearted, church-burning fun took a wrong turn when, as it turns out, the church he set ablaze contained the remains of 9/11 victims.  Schroeder says he does not remember anything about that night.  The law firm he was slated to work for, which had offices in the World Trade Center, has rescinded his job offer.

Orly Taitz

She is a lawyer, a dentist, a real estate broker, a black belt in Taekwondo, owns a chain of dental clinics, is a mother of three and speaks five languages…she’s also the leading figure in the “birther” movement, determined to prove that President Obama is not a natural born US citizen.  In addition to Obama’s place of birth, Orly has investigated a number of other issues concerning Obama.  Fair enough.  How do we really know President Obama is not a Kenyan-born, homosexual-murdering, car-vandalizing, Marxist Muslim? In any event,  Orly’s quest for truth went awry when she angered federal judge Clay Land, prompting him to call her court filing “breathtaking in its arrogance and border[ing] on delusional.”   Now Orly’s on the hook for a $20,000 fine.

Larry Wilder

Okay, this is kind of sad, and Larry Wilder isn’t in the same league as the other people listed here, but for reasons you can probably understand, this picture has taken on a life of its own.

Larry Wilder did all the right things in planning for his night out.  He didn’t drive.  He didn’t hurt anyone or vandalize anything.  And if you were expecting hookers or cocaine to appear somewhere in this story, then you’ll be sorely disappointed.  The man didn’t even enter his house and risk disturbing his family when he arrived home late at night.  Instead, he waited outside and sobered up.  His only mistake was seeking shelter inside his neighbor’s garbage can.  Unfortunately for him, the neighbor called the police, and someone took pictures that spread all over the Internet.  Wilder soon after resigned from his job as City Attorney of Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan

Some would call it a gross miscarriage of justice –- for-profit jailers paying $2.6 million in kickbacks to judges for sending undeserving juveniles to their facilities –- but the involved judges didn’t.  They called it THE GRAVY TRAIN.  Since 2002, Ciavarella and Conahan sent over 5,000 kids off to the juvenile detention centers to keep their pockets lined.

Peter Cammarano

A rabbi, a crooked politician, black market Gucci bags, organized crime, drugs, and money laundering.  No, it’s not Quentin Tarantino’s next movie, it’s New Jersey, and Peter Cammarano, mayor of Hoboken, was caught right in the middle of it.  Cammarano was accused of taking $25,000 in bribes from an informant working for the FBI.  Naturally, Cammarano has denied all the charges and looks forward to clearing his name.

Kumari Fulbright

This doesn’t really involve a lawyer, but it does involve a law student, machine guns, beauty pageants and kidnapping, so it deserves a spot here.  Kumari Fulbright, a law student at the University of Arizona, is a former beauty queen and also modeled for a little place called subguns.com, where women in bikinis wield machine guns.  Apparently the bikini-gun gigs weren’t paying well enough, because Kumari decided to do diversify her income with a little kidnapping for profit.  After holding her ex boyfriend at gun point for more than 10 hours, he escaped and she went to prison.  Do you think she’ll get past the character and fitness committee?

Marc Dreier

Marc Dreier would have been a run of the mill $700,000,000 ponzi scheme operator, except that Dreier and accomplices began impersonating other people to keep it going, adding a stranger than fiction twist to his story.   In one amazing stunt, Dreier hired someone to impersonate a big shot real estate developer, snuck into that real estate developer’s actual office, commandeered a conference room, and held a meeting between the fake developer and hedge fund investors.  In an interview recounting the event, Dreier says he wasn’t even nervous.

Dreier was finally caught in Toronto, where he was posing as a pension fund lawyer, trying to convince another hedge fund to lend him money. It’s shame Dreier went into law instead of the CIA — he would have made the best spy, ever.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 9:51 am by Nick and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.