State Bar Complaint Filed Against McCulloch Over Ferguson Grand Jury

He’s Having A Really Bad Day

by Debi Johnson-Champ 

 St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch’s mishandling of the Michael Brown grand jury has not only resulted in a federal action, but a formal complaint to the Missouri State Bar for ethical violations committed by McCulloch and his minions.
Coming on the heels of the federal action filed by the ACLU of Missouri to lift the life-time gag order imposed on grand jurors, an eleven page complaint was filed with the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel claiming that McCulloch, as well as Assistant Prosecuting Attorneys Kathi Alizadeh and Sheila Whirley violated some 15 different Rules of Professional Conduct by:

1. Presenting the grand jury with a legal instruction ruled unconstitutional for decades.
2. Mislabeling and misplacing evidence related to key witness Dorian Johnson.
3. Failing to provide specific charges to the jury after ‘dumping’ on them thousands of pages of interviews and evidence the complainants cite as going above gross negligence.

The complaint was filed by Ethics Project founder Christi Griffin, other attorneys and a former judge, following their review of the grand jury transcript, witness interviews and other evidence.

 

The Chief Disciplinary Counsel is required to investigate the allegations filed against McCulloch, Alizadeh and Whirley, and if there is sufficient evidence to support the charges, to prosecute any and all ethical misconduct that impairs the integrity of the profession or threatens the public at large.
Griffin believes that the prosecutors permitted perjured testimony to be placed before the grand jurors.
McCulloch has already stated:

“I thought it was much more important to present anybody and everybody, and some, yes, clearly were not telling the truth, no question about it.”

But according to Griffin:

“He is the one that is allowing that perjured testimony to be presented to the grand jury and that is a direct violation of the Code of Professional Ethics.”

While he has been under a firestorm of criticism, McCulloch has no regrets. McCulloch is on record that:

“Overall, I don’t see a whole lot that we would have done differently. . . . I did what I thought was right under the circumstances in presenting everything to the grand jury. So I assumed everything would be gone through with a fine tooth comb and analyzed and criticized as it has been — sometimes without looking at the facts, but that’s how some people operate.”

Bar complaints are not typically resolved overnight. McCulloch has not been personally served as of yet with either the federal lawsuit (brought by the juror) or the state bar complaint.
However, in deciding whether to discipline McCulloch, the Missouri State Bar must go over McCulloch’s actions with the “same fine tooth comb” that McCulloch claimed to have used in his search for truth and justice.