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Prosecutors

Acting US attorney once orchestrated Facebook posts criticizing judge presiding in his case, report says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 28, 2025, 11:12 am CDT

The acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., formerly helped ghostwrite posts criticizing a judge presiding in a civil case in which he was the defendant, according to lawsuit documents cited by ProPublica.

U.S. attorney nominee Edward R. Martin Jr. helped his associate, Priscilla Gray, write the posts that began in 2016 after the Illinois judge “dealt Martin a major setback in the case,” according to the report by ProPublica, noted by Bloomberg Law’s Wake Up Call. Martin is filling the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia position on an acting basis.

Gray’s posts on the judge’s Facebook page called the judge a “politician” with the “lowest rating for a judge in Illinois.”

Martin had urged Gray to call the judge’s actions “unfair and rigged over and over,” according to ProPublica. He also urged Gray to privately message the judge, the article reports.

The judge was presiding in a case seeking to oust Martin from association with a grassroots group that he once headed, the Eagle Forum. The plaintiff was Anne Schlafly Cori, an Eagle Forum board member who was the daughter of the group’s founder, Phyllis Schlafly.

The truth about Martin’s involvement in the criticism “emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit,” according to ProPublica.

President Donald Trump has nominated Martin, who has no prosecution experience, to remain in the U.S. attorney position. Martin did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gray also declined to comment to the publication.

Andy Schlafly, a former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin, told ProPublica that Gray “speaks for herself” and had every right to express her outrage. He also said no court has ever sanctioned Martin for his “First Amendment advocacy.”

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A federal judge in Colorado issued a scathing rebuke of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for allegedly submitting a court filing rife with errors because his attorney allegedly used a generative artificial intelligence program, citing several court cases that don’t exist. The filing came in connection with a defamation lawsuit against the pillow magnate filed by Eric Coomer, the former head of product security for Dominion Voting Systems, over the numerous false claims levied against him and the company by Lindell following the 2020 presidential election.

According to a six-page order from U.S. District Judge Nina Y. Wang, the incident began when Lindell’s attorney, Christopher Kachouroff, came unprepared to an April 21, hearing. During that hearing, Wang questioned Kachouroff about a number of errors in an opposition motion he had signed and filed.

“These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist,” Wang wrote. “Despite having every opportunity to do so, Mr. Kachouroff declined to explain to the Court how the Opposition became replete with such fundamental errors.”

Kachouroff initially claimed that he had simply “made a mistake” and accidentally “paraphrased” some cases, but eventually told the court that he had “given the cite checking to another person.”

“Time and time again, when Mr. Kachouroff was asked for an explanation of why citations to legal authorities were inaccurate, he declined to offer any explanation, or suggested that it was a “draft pleading,” the judge wrote.

A New Jersey mother says she is taking legal action against a day care that has given her no explanation for how her 2-year-old daughter came home last week with one of her “cornrow” hair braids missing from her head — claiming they didn’t know if her child “pulled it out” herself or whether something more nefarious happened.

“You have to use some type of force for a braid to be removed,” Tamara Hemingway told New York ABC station WABC about her daughter, Myla, and what happened to her.

“It was a cornrow so it was braided down to her scalp,” Hemingway said. “There’s no way that, I don’t know who could have done it, but I know for a fact she or a kid would not have done that.”

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Obituaries

Plane crash victims include 2 Wilkinson Stekloff associates, civil rights attorney set to join law faculty

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 3, 2025, 10:53 am CST

Victims of the Washington, D.C., plane crash Jan. 29 include two Wilkinson Stekloff associates and a civil rights lawyer planning to join the faculty of the Howard University School of Law this fall.

The associates were Sarah Lee Best and Elizabeth Keys, according to the Wilkinson Stekloff website. They were both 33 years old; Keys died on her birthday. The civil rights attorney was 30-year-old Kiah Duggins, according to her employer, the Civil Rights Corps, and an obituary by her alma mater, Harvard Law School.

Among publications with coverage are Law360, Original Jurisdiction, Law.com (here and here), People and the Wall Street Journal.

While at Harvard Law School, Duggins helped protect families from COVID-19 pandemic evictions as president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. According to John Goldberg, the dean of Harvard Law School, Duggins was known for optimism, kindness and empathy.

“As a student and lawyer, Kiah was known for her boundless enthusiasm for advancing justice for the most vulnerable, and for building community,” Goldberg wrote.

Before joining the Civil Rights Corp, Duggins worked with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the law firm Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin. At the Civil Rights Corps, Duggins challenged unconstitutional policing and money bail practices.

She was also a former Miss Kansas contestant and a graduate of Wichita State University. During her undergrad years, she was a White House intern working for former first lady Michelle Obama, according to Law.com.

Best and Keys were returning to Washington, D.C., from a deposition when their American Airlines plane crashed with an Army Black Hawk helicopter, according to Original Jurisdiction.

Keys, a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, clerked for U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia before joining Wilkinson Stekloff in December 2021. During law school, she was the managing editor of the Georgetown Food and Drug Law Journal.

While an undergraduate at Tufts University, Keys was part of the sailing team, her partner, David Seidman, told Law.com.

David A. Super, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, told Law360 that Keys was “an extraordinary law student and an even better person.” Keys “was everything a great lawyer should be: meticulous but creative, focused but flexible, professional but kind,” Super said.

Best worked for Teach for America before attending the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She graduated in 2021. She clerked for U.S. District Judge John Cronan of the Southern District of New York, U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge Eugene E. Siler Jr. of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati.

Best began work at Wilkinson Stekloff in November.

Cronan told Law360 that Best would spend hours mentoring law student interns to help them with research and writing.

“She was so caring and thoughtful and generous and had a wonderful sense of humor,” Cronan said.

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3. Judge apologizes to slain jogger Ahmaud Arbery’s…

Criminal Justice

Judge apologizes to slain jogger Ahmaud Arbery’s family after tossing charges against district attorney

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 10, 2025, 9:21 am CST

A Georgia judge has tossed the charges against a prosecutor accused of favoring a former white investigator in her office before he was charged in the 2020 death of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery.

Former Brunswick, Georgia, District Attorney Jackie Johnson had been charged with violating her oath of office and obstructing a police officer in the investigation that followed Arbery’s death. Her trial began in January, according to PBS News.

Judge John R. Turner of Glynn County, Georgia, granted a directed verdict on the obstruction charge Feb. 3 after concluding that prosecutors failed to present sufficient evidence that Johnson obstructed the death investigation. Turner tossed the oath-violation charge two days later after defense lawyers argued that the indictment didn’t accuse Johnson of crimes in connection with the charge and listed the wrong oath of office.

Publications covering the tossed charges are Courthouse News Service, Law360 and the Associated Press.

Arbery, 25, was shot and killed after two white men pursued him in a pickup truck because they thought that he was a suspect in several break-ins in the area. A white neighbor who joined the pursuit in his truck recorded the incident on video. No arrests were made for more than two months.

The leaked video later showed that the shooter was Travis McMichael. His father, Gregory McMichael, a former police office who once worked for Johnson, had joined the chase. The man who shot the video was William “Roddie” Bryan. All three were convicted in November 2021, when jurors rejected arguments that they were making a citizen’s arrest and that Arbery was shot in self-defense when Arbery tried to grab a gun. They were also convicted of federal hate crimes in August 2022.

Several witnesses had testified that Johnson never directed anyone to refrain from arresting the McMichaels, according to Courthouse News Service. Johnson testified that she immediately recused herself from the case when she found out that her former employee was involved. When she saw the video, Johnson said, she thought that the slaying “looked like murder,” and she informed the Georgia Bureau of Investigation about calls that she had received from Gregory McMichael.

Turner apologized to Arbery’s family members after tossing the final charge, according to Courthouse News Service.

“This is not a decision I wanted to make, but feel like I must,” he said.

Turner also said he feels “sadness for the death of this young man and what his family has gone through.”

Johnson was represented by lawyer Brian Steel, who also represented rapper Young Thug in a high-profile criminal trial. Steel said Johnson should not have been charged.

“It’s a sad day. Ahmaud Arbery was slaughtered for no reason, and then-Attorney General Chris Carr piggybacked one of the greatest tragedies in our state and nation and indicted an innocent woman,” Steel told Courthouse News Service.

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Criminal Justice

Florida lawyer accused of stalking another attorney, texting rap songs with threatening lyrics

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 10, 2025, 11:45 am CST

A lawyer in Coral Gables, Florida, was charged with aggravating stalking Thursday for allegedly harassing another attorney who was so concerned that he sent his employees home from his law office.

Florida lawyer Carlos L. Santi, 43, was arrested while holding pizza boxes carrying the name of the lawyer he allegedly targeted and the name of the lawyer’s wife, report Law.com, the Miami Herald and WPLG.

Santi is a lawyer with the Property & Casualty Law Group in Florida. The alleged victim, who is also a Coral Gables attorney, contacted police Feb. 4 about the alleged harassment.

The victim told police that Santi had shown up uninvited to his law office, had passed by his house while texting that he was there, had texted rap songs with threatening lyrics, and had mentioned the targeted attorney’s children, according to allegations in an arrest report and an affidavit cited by the news articles.

Video surveillance showed Santi walking past the other lawyer’s residence while staring at his home, according to the police report.

On Friday, Judge Mindy S. Glazer of the Miami-Dade circuit court issued a stay-away order to protect the allegedly targeted attorney and his family, the articles reported.

Santi was recently sanctioned in a civil case before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nicholas P. Mizell of the Middle District of Florida. Mizell chastised Santi in a condo association case for failing to file a disclosure and lead counsel designation, despite reminders.

In a Jan. 7 order, Mizell referred Santi to the court’s grievance committee to provide Santi counseling on improving his practices or to recommend appropriate remedial action. The judge also ordered Santi to pay $200 to the Southwest Florida Federal Court Bar Association to be used in “ongoing efforts to elevate the practice of law.”

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For the last three decades, complaints about the bar exam were common but change was minimal. But Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt wanted to do more than grumble.

While most lawyers take the bar exam and then never want to think about it again, Merritt, 69, and Howarth, 74, have never forgotten. They have been diligently committed to keeping the conversation going about changes to the traditional exam, which launched 53 years ago.

Each marched forward, conducting research over 25 years that investigated why licensing processes need to change and what remedies would halt the inequities stemming from the current exam process.

Now, with the Uniform Bar Exam due to sunset in 2028, these two retired academics are the go-to advisers for jurisdictions evaluating wide-ranging options for licensure as they bring the duo’s ideas on reform closer to reality.

“They are two incredible thought leaders in the licensure space,” says Brian Gallini, dean of Quinnipiac University School of Law, who worked with both women on the Oregon State Bar’s reform efforts. “We should have been listening to them much earlier.”

Merritt, professor emerita at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, was co-principal investigator of the landmark 2020 report Building a Better Bar. She left teaching a year later to devote her retirement years to bar reform and has been hands-on in reform efforts around the country, including those in Oregon, Nevada and California. In addition, she has spoken to groups in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Utah, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas and Massachusetts about bar reform.

Howarth, who was dean at Michigan State University College of Law from 2008-2016 and, as of July 1, professor emerita at University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, wrote the 2022 book Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing. Along with advising other states’ efforts, Howarth chairs Nevada’s Foundational Subject Requirement and Performance Test Implementation Task Force and is a member of the Commission to Study the Administration of the Bar Examination and Licensing of Attorneys. The commission developed the Nevada Plan, a unique three-stage licensing process mimicking that of medical licensure.

The pair, who met in 2016, also is involved with the National Center for State Courts’ look at practical suggestions for licensure reform: They both sit on its Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform’s bar admissions working group.

“The two of them are quite the dynamic duo,” says Susan Smith Bakhshian, the director of bar programs and a clinical professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who worked with both women on California’s failed attempt to create a portfolio bar exam. “They work together, not in a way of two people who have exactly the same skills, but they complement each other.”

Bar none

Both women’s focus on the bar exam bloomed in the 1990s.

For Merritt, the obsession started after a colleague asked her to analyze statistics related to states raising their passing scores.

“The first thing that actually jumped out was that states were deciding to raise the score just as significant numbers of women and people of color were coming into the profession,” she says. “That naturally concerned and outraged me.”

Meanwhile, Howarth was then a professor at Golden Gate University School of Law, “very much a public-interest, nonfancy law school for working adults,” she says. She saw firsthand how the current system favors students with the financial resources to afford expensive bar prep and unpaid time off to memorize myriad legal standards, she says.

As educators, each saw good students who performed well in classrooms, moot courts and legal clinics but couldn’t pass the bar. Many times, it stemmed from racial and other inequity issues, they say. In 2023, white bar-takers in the U.S. had a first-time pass rate of 84%; Asians, 74%; Hispanics, 71%; and Blacks, 58%, according to the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

And each encountered many law students who were not practice-ready at graduation, as law school curricula and the pencil-and-paper bar exam emphasized memorization over skills.

“I had been a very pointy-headed, front-of-the-classroom professor,” Merritt says, “but coming into the clinic, I just thought, ‘Wow, there’s all these ways in which we’re not preparing our students if they don’t take a clinic and really serve clients.’”

When the pandemic initially hit, academic peers fretted as jurisdictions were forced to rethink the necessity of in-person bar exams. But “Joan said, ‘You know, there’s an opportunity here for us to speak up about the bar exam,’” Merritt adds.

And they did just that. In March 2020, they worked with a group of other academics to publish “The Bar Exam and the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Need for Immediate Action” in the St. Louis University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series.

“My only complaint is, I can’t keep up with Debby in terms of her productivity,” Howarth says. “She’s supersmart and superbright and has a motor to keep working that is really remarkable. We are very happy to keep learning from each other.”

Howarth’s “values are not just ones that I admire and share, but she’s so committed to them,” Merritt adds. “I strive to be as committed.”

Still, they don’t always agree on tactics. It took Howarth a while to convince Merritt to work on Nevada’s new multiple-choice exam.

“I never in my life thought that I would spend part of my retirement working on a multiple-choice test,” Merritt says. “But in Nevada’s plan, it works.”

Howarth anticipates that 10 years from now, the licensing process will vary from state to state, and most new lawyers will have had some kind of supervised practice before becoming licensed.

“People will get that that’s fundamentally necessary for client protection,” she adds. “And we will have multiple pathways for licensure that are less expensive and that will help us to have a more inclusive and more effective profession.”

Merritt finishes Howarth’s thought: “And one that serves clients more effectively, and I hope, also gains more recognition among states—that if you’ve been licensed by one state, then you’re a competent lawyer, and you can simply come and practice in our state.”

These days, they are excited to be change-makers watching their own ideas come to fruition, with 13 jurisdictions making or considering moves to change licensure, according to the website devoted to bar exam changes that Merritt maintains.

“Sometimes, we still have trouble believing it is happening,” Merritt says. “Sometimes, we look back and say, ‘Remember, even as recently as 2016? Did we think any of this was possible?’”

Legal Rebels Class of 2025

Rodrigo Camarena

Roy Ferguson

Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt

Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners

Swapna Reddy

Jacqueline Schafer

Noella Sudbury

In This Podcast:

A Florida defense attorney was arrested in connection to a monthslong investigation into how illegal drugs were finding their way in to the county jail.

Nathan Williams, 37, was arrested on Jan. 5 and charged with eight felonies including two counts of giving drugs or controlled substances to an inmate. According to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in a press conference held on Jan. 7, Williams allegedly conspired with inmates at the Duval County Jail and their family members to smuggle in “drug-soaked” paperwork that he claimed were legal documents.