Single Jeopardy Read Free

response, but it must have struck a proper chord, because I didn’t hear from them again for another two years. This time it was another nasty letter telling me that I was once again being accused of wrongfully advertising because of my personalized license plate – “PS ESQ.”
    I did some quick research with our state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and informed the State Bar that they finally caught me, and I would be looking forward to my hearing, assuming they would be holding it in the downtown sports arena, so that the other three thousand two hundred fifty one California lawyers with “ESQ” in their license plates could also attend with their attorneys and defend themselves.
    Once again they backed down. I never had any problems with the State Bar again over unethical advertising – but they finally got their pound of flesh: any other attorney in the same situation would probably have gotten a slap on the wrist and a severe warning to straighten out his act. I was expecting a suspended sentence and maybe a fine, but it’s not a perfect world.
    In view of my past experiences with our revered State Bar Association, along with the fact that Ricky appeared as a witness for the State Bar and blamed everything on me, testifying that I set him up with the mail box and shared the fees, the prosecutors took Ricky, the convicted criminal’s word over mine. Several years before my hearing the State Bar lifted its ban on advertising; the judges didn’t care – they admitted the recitations anyway, as evidence of my lack of respect for them. The Bar must have decided that it was time to make an example of another attorney, so I wound up with a two-year suspension and probation. Go figure. An immediate appeal might have delayed the suspension for a while, but considering all that was happening in my life at the time, I thought a break from the active practice of defending scumbags for a while might be a good thing… an appeal could always be done later… and that’s why I’m sitting in a back yard on Waterford Street in Brentwood Glen, trying to talk my friend Stuart out of going ahead with a suit against the Federal Government. I’ve had enough of going up against the establishment for a while.
    The suspension was bad enough, but it had a profound effect on my prosecutor wife and her mad dog associates. I was now looked upon as a common criminal… because for the next two years I would be reduced to doing legal research, private investigating and process serving for other attorneys. In their eyes there were only two types of criminal defense attorneys: those who had been suspended for unethical behavior and those who hadn’t been caught yet... and neither category met with their approval.
    With the help of her associates, my beloved wife finally came out of the ether and decided that I was a social liability that had to be cut loose, so she decided to downsize the household. Therefore, I am now sitting on the aft deck of my liveaboard yacht enjoying the surrounding sea of grass, while she conspires with Gary Koontz, her beady-eyed divorce attorney… a former classmate of mine. I never liked him back then in law school, and still can’t stand him.
    Amazingly, our divorce proceedings went quite smoothly, in spite of our respective attorneys’ efforts to screw up the case and build up their fees. My attorney specializes in representing male members of the Bar, so having only lawyers as clients, he didn’t think it was too big an oversight to miss a court appearance. In my case, he didn’t show up the day of the hearing, so the judge filled in for him by asking me the stock questions off of a prepared sheet that contain the ones that judges usually ask unrepresented women who come in for their default divorce hearings. Everything went fine. I knew the judge from past appearances in other court matters, so as a courtesy he even offered to give me back my maiden name. Everyone wants to be comedian.
    The Property