Is it ethical for a curcuit court judge to compel a respondent to represent himself in a hearing on an Order for Protection when the respondent is represented by counsel who has filed an entry of appearance and whose counsel had contacted the judge's coordinator shortly after the hearing time.
Hearing set for 9 am. respondents counsel had conflict with a trial hearing that took precedence. Counsel contacted Judge's coordinator and related that he would be at courthouse for hearing just as soon as possible. Court held hearing to end of docket and then Judge announced from bench that he had had no contact from counsel and that court was going ahead with hearing compelling the respondent to act in his own behalf.
The prior hearing was the exact same scenario with another party.
What is the name of your state: Arkansas
As I see it, just based on what you said above, the fault here lies not with the judge, but with the respondent’s lawyer. The hearing was scheduled for a particular day and time and respondent’s lawyer knew it. He also had another trial set for the same time. Why didn’t the attorney act on this as soon as the hearing was scheduled? Trials are generally scheduled well in advance, and even hearings on protection orders are generally scheduled at least a few days in advance. So the attorney should have either ensured the hearing was held at a different time (if the court clerk contacted the lawyer before scheduling the hearing to clear a time the lawyer would be available) or, if the court simply scheduled a time without consulting the attorneys first the attorney should have promptly filed for a continuance to try to ensure that he or she would not have this conflict. Or, if the lawyer is in a firm with other attorneys, he or should have got one of the other attorneys to cover it, as Ohiogal points out. Instead, the attorney apparently did neither. I’m guessing the attorney either (1) thought the trial matter would settle and there wouldn’t be a conflict or (2) simply didn’t realize the conflict until the day of the hearing. Attorneys should never bank on (1) and it is not excusable to end up in (2).
So what does the attorney do instead? The attorney contacts the court shortly AFTER the hearing was set to begin and tells the court that the the atorney would be to the hearing “as soon as possible” and ditched respondent to attend that more pressing trial. Trials can last longer than an attorney expects; indeed, it is not uncommon for that to happen. He should have anticipated that and sought a continuance/rescheduling of the hearing as soon as he was aware of the conflict.
The judge did not even have to push your hearing back to the end of the docket but was willing to accomodate the no show lawyer that much anyway. The lawyer still didn’t show by the time all the other hearings on the docket were done and the court was ready to hold this final hearing of the day. Respondents lawyer wasn’t there and there was no motion to continue for the court to consider so the judge went ahead with the hearing. The other side already had to wait the entire time the court worked through the other cases on the docket (with the meter running on their lawyer’s fee, if he/she had a lawyer charging by the hour); why should the other side have to suffer paying for that and taking all that time just for the court at the end of the day to cancel the hearing because the respondent’s lawyer was a no show? It’s not their fault, after all. The respondent, on the other hand, can’t really blame the judge for not accommodating him/her further since the respondent picked that lawyer in the first place and the lawyer works for the respondent.
Just based on what you said, not only did the judge not do anything unethical here, the judge did more than he/she had to do and in the end held the hearing as scheduled, as he or she should without a compelling reason to continue it. The respondent’s lawyer being a no-show would have been a good reason to continue it, perhaps, if the reason for not appearing was some emergency that the lawyer could not control (e.g. lawyer was in the hospital emergency room) but, as I said before, trials are scheduled well in advance. The lawyer had to know before this hearing came up that there was a conflict, and it was up to the attorney to address that conflict BEFORE the hearing, not by calling the court AFTER the scheduled hearing time and even then all the lawyer did was say he or she would be there ASAP. That’s pretty ineffective. The judge was probably ticked off at the lawyer for that, and certainly the respondent should be, too.
