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First Amendment

Lawyer arrested at state bar meeting for carrying petitions reaches settlement

By Debra Cassens Weiss

January 22, 2025, 2:58 pm CST

An Arkansas lawyer who was arrested for carrying ballot petitions at a state bar meeting in June 2024 has reached an out-of-court settlement that calls for payment of $200,000 to her lawyers.

Lawyer Jennifer Standerfer of Bentonville, Arkansas, settled with the Arkansas Bar Association; the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas; its police department and a city commission that owns the convention center where Standerfer was arrested for solicitation, the Arkansas Times reports. The settlement followed a mediation.

A joint statement by the parties said they “regret the fact of Ms. Standerfer’s arrest,” and they acknowledge that the lawyer had a constitutional right to carry the petitions.

Standerfer had argued that the First Amendment protected her. She had carried the petitions into the Hot Springs Convention Center, at first in a small wagon with a sign and on a second day by clipboards. She didn’t seek signatures but made the petitions available to anyone who wanted to sign them, she told KARK.com and the Arkansas Advocate after the meeting.

One proposed ballot measure would broaden the reach of the state’s Freedom of Information Act and stiffen penalties for violations, according to the Arkansas Advocate. The other would amend the Arkansas Constitution to create a government obligation to share information.

Standerfer was a committee member of the group sponsoring the petition drive, Arkansas Citizens for Transparency. After Standerfer’s arrest, the group obtained materials about the arrest through the state’s Freedom of Information Act, KARK.com reported.

Video obtained by the group showed officers telling Standerfer that she was being asked to leave. When she refused, officers handcuffed the lawyer and removed her from the event. She was not formally charged.

A state bar representative had texted the convention center asking staff members to ask Standerfer to leave because of the petitions, documents indicated. The bar had said after Standerfer’s arrest, no one authorized to speak for the association had sought Standerfer’s removal.

Standerfer had explained why she backed greater transparency in an April 2024 opinion column for theNorthwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“The FOIA is how we know what our government is doing,” she wrote. “It is how we hold politicians accountable, and we should do a whole lot more than question any politician who says that we should sacrifice our rights under the FOIA in the name of ‘efficiency.’”

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Ethics

Lawyer is accused of charging inmates for resentencing petitions despite little chance of success

By Debra Cassens Weiss

September 5, 2024, 9:17 am CDT

A Los Angeles lawyer is accused in an ethics complaint of charging inmates to submit requests for resentencing to prosecutors who were unlikely to take action.

Lawyer Aaron Spolin charged inmates to submit petitions to prosecutors when they were not accepting outside submissions and when the cases did not fit resentencing criteria, according to an Aug. 26 notice of disciplinary charges.

Defendants who hired Spolin were unlikely to obtain “meaningful relief” despite paying thousands of dollars in legal fees, the notice said.

Law360, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times and the Metropolitan News-Enterprise have coverage.

The impetus for Spolin’s resentencing work was a 2018 law that allowed courts to recall and resentence defendants upon the recommendation of the district attorney.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Spolin marketed his resentencing services in mass mailings to prisons and through purchased online search terms that directed people to his website.

Spolin “eventually accumulated nearly 2,000 incarcerated clients, becoming a virtual celebrity on California prison yards,” the newspaper reported. “Families, many of limited resources, forked over fees starting at $3,000 and ranging upward of $30,000.”

The ethics complaint did not include most of those details. But it did say family members of one inmate paid Spolin as much as $28,500 for a package deal that included a case review, a resentencing request and a commutation application. Others paid less.

Spolin represented inmates despite receiving nine letters from the Los Angeles district attorney’s office informing him that it would not act on resentencing requests under the new law because it was creating a new unit to evaluate cases and because it was prioritizing cases for review.

He also received at least eight letters from the Orange County district attorney’s office disclosing that it would only consider resentencing requests from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The criteria eventually adopted by the Los Angeles district attorney said cases would be prioritized if the defendant was age 50 or older, had served at least 10 years of a 20-year or longer sentence, and had committed a nonviolent or a nonserious crime.

Among Spolin’s clients were inmates in prison for murder, second-degree murder and kidnapping.

The ethics charges allege that Spolin failed to communicate in a way that allowed clients to make informed decisions, failed to give candid advice, misled clients about his services, charged unconscionable fees, and committed acts of moral turpitude.

Spolin told the Los Angeles Times last year that some clients would eventually have success when the justice system embraced additional reforms.

“All these clients who feel like they’ve been hoodwinked, and then they’re gonna win. And they’re gonna say, ‘Oh, wow. You know, Mr. Spolin was right,’” he said.

Erin Joyce, a lawyer for Spolin, told the Los Angeles Times that Spolin “has been fully cooperative with the state bar and will continue to cooperate. He looks forward to resolving this matter in the near future.”