This is not a post about politics in the United States, though the title of the post might make it seem like it could be.
This is instead a post that has to be written because I saw a headline and thought, “well that has to be fodder for a post,” and then it turned out to be a new story about someone I wrote about previously.
(NB: I could have titled this post, “Turns out it was a story about two men named Brady” but that would have been both too deep of a deep cut if you are a new reader, and a pretty unacceptable level of punnery even for a Friday post.)
Having now “cleared my throat” on screen more than sufficiently, I’ll actually deliver some content… this is a quick hit follow up on a story I wrote about back in the before-times… July 2019.
Christopher Brady used to be a Florida lawyer. He got disbarred for some Hollywood (California not Florida) style breaking and entering to steal a computer server from his former law firm.
I got pulled into writing about his story originally because the ABA Journal online ran a headline about how he got disbarred over punctuation which was, at best, partially correct. (He created a new law firm that had the same name as the firm that had terminated him but that added periods to the abbreviation part of the law firm name, so that his former employer was Barak Law Group, PA but his new firm was Barak Law Group, P.A.)
(Barak. Like a misspelled version of the first name of the most-recent prior President of the United States. Barack Obama. You remember him, right. A man who would have never responded to a question about whether there would be a peaceful transition of power in the United States in a chilling fashion.)
So, why am I rehashing this guy’s story? Well, because the ABA Journal got me with a headline again, but this time it appears the headline was 100% accurate:
Disbarred lawyer is convicted even though twin took responsibility for the crime.
I mean, come on. Now that I know this guy had a twin brother, how in the world was that not more integral to the defense of the disciplinary proceedings?
“No, I’m not the guy you see on that video recording tying a rope from that truck to the front door of the Barak Law Group law firm and then moving the truck so that the door rips open. . . No, sir, not me. Also, I’m not one of the two guys on that tape who go inside and take out a safe and a computer server. No, sir. I’ve got a twin. That has to be the work of my twin!”
(The above is, of course, entirely fictional dialogue I just made up out of whole cloth.)
The twin defense didn’t exactly work in the latest criminal case, of course, but still. “Feels” like this should have been mentioned earlier.
The criminal case that captured the ABA Journal’s attention this week involves a crime that has much more of a “Better Call Saul” flavor rather than the “Breaking Bad” style of the truck-door-computer server heist. The criminal act was the faking of a court order impacting child custody for the benefit of the lawyer’s twin brother. The fake order, which indicated it was filed on a day the court clerk’s office wasn’t open for business and which included misspellings such as “habeus” and “honerable,” commanded the twin brother’s ex-wife to deliver custody of the child to the twin brother. According to the news reports of the trial, the former lawyer was convicted for the forgery even though the twin brother testified that he was the one who committed the act.
Interestingly, these events all occurred earlier in time than the server heist. The events leading to this conviction actually did involve the Florida lawyer acting as a lawyer because he was representing his twin brother in the child custody proceedings and was still permitted to practice law during the events. Representing family is often a bad idea for lawyers. The reasons typically are more subtle than the issues presented by the Brady twins.
If you’re looking for photos of the twins (identical not fraternal), rest assured they do have the “Florida man” flavor you might expect and you can get them at this link to some local Florida media.