In Texas, can prosecutors be defense attorneys for free outside the job? In another thread, I was told that DAs and other prosecutors are typically prohibited from engaging in volunteer, pro bono work. However, I've now come across the following Texas Bar statement, which seems to allow public attorneys to engage in pro bono practice. It raises the question, &quot;Do legal aid staff attorneys, public defenders, and prosecutors count their work time as pro bono, since they provide free legal services to the poor?&quot; This is the answer (emphasis added): No. Although the services are free to the clients, the attorneys are paid for their work at salaries they have accepted. However, if these attorneys provide volunteer legal assistance to the poor outside their regular work, they may report those hours as pro bono service. Does this mean that public attorneys can engage in pro bono work in Texas? If so, are there strings attached? For example, would a public attorney be able to represent their friends and family so long as they don't charge for the work?
I was told that DAs and other prosecutors are typically prohibited from engaging in volunteer, pro bono work You have not really understood the linked answer and are oversimplifying its analysis. I'll restate the analysis in a different way in this answer in the hope of providing greater clarity. The key to understanding that question is that the question presented there was: &quot;Are DAs and other prosecutors prohibited from being defense attorneys, such as in a pro bono fashion?&quot; Having a prosecutor do criminal defense work presents conflicts that other types of pro bono work frequently would not. Does this mean that public attorneys can engage in pro bono work in Texas? If so, are there strings attached? For example, would a public attorney be able to represent their friends and family so long as they don't charge for the work? These questions don't have a single global answer and must be analyzed on a case by case basis. It depends upon whether the pro bono work constitutes a conflict of interest with the public attorneys' regular work (i.e. what kind of legal work is done pro bono and for whom) and it depends upon the policies of the lawyer's particular employer. There are two distinct questions presented, neither of which are materially different in Texas than they were in the previous question. One is when doing so would violate the professional ethical obligations of a lawyer, which is what the Texas Bar Association statement is talking about. The other is whether it is permissible in a manner consistent with the contractual employer-employee relationship of any particular Texas attorney working on a full time salaried basis for a particular employer. This is a subject upon which the Texas Bar Association statement is silent. Professional Ethics Considerations As noted above, one question is whether pro bono work by a prosecutor in the specific subject matter of criminal defense would constitute a conflict of interest. The answer to that question is &quot;usually yes&quot; for the reasons explained in the linked question. One can also easily imagine other circumstances where pro bono work could pit a salaried government lawyer against his employer, such as a state attorney general's office lawyer doing pro bono civil rights litigation against the state government. But, not all pro bono legal work constitutes a conflict of interest. For example, a prosecutor doing pro bono work helping low income people prepare documents naming legal guardians for their children in the event that they predecease their children (the very first pro bono case I took on as a Colorado attorney) would be very unlikely to be conflict of interest for the prosecutor, even though a pro bono criminal defense case in the county where the prosecutor practices would be an obvious and direct unethical conflict of interest. Similarly, judges frequently do pro bono work, where authorized to do so by the court systems in which they work, in the areas of legal education for non-lawyers (like High School Mock Trial competitions or lectures to school students) and by providing mediation services to indigent parties outside the judicial district where they practice, that are specifically calculated to avoid conflicts of interests, or appearance of bias or impropriety. Employment Relationship Considerations The second issue is whether &quot;public attorneys can engage in pro bono work in Texas?&quot; in a case with a subject matter that does not otherwise present a conflict of interest. Public sector attorneys are not prohibited from doing so as a matter of professional ethics. But, that isn't the only consideration. The other consideration is whether doing that pro bono work violates the employment policies of a public sector employer of a lawyer in the usual case when a public sector lawyer is employed on a salaried basis for the full efforts or something similar, of the lawyer. This is basically an issue of contract law, not of professional ethics. The way this is usually dealt with in private law practice when a salaried attorney works for a law firm is that the private salaried lawyer needs to obtain law firm permission to do pro bono work and that pro bono work is often structured so that the pro bono client's lawyer is the law firm itself and the lawyer in that firm doing the actual pro bono work is often just one agent of the firm as a whole that actual represents the pro bono client. Frequently, salaried lawyers in private law firms have quotas of billable hours which they have to meet as a condition of employment each year at the law firm, and frequently a private law firm's pro bono program allows the salaried lawyer to count hours working for the law firm's pro bono clients towards that annual billable hour quota. Incidentally, there is nothing magic in the absence of a conflict of interest, about limiting &quot;moonlighting work&quot; to unpaid pro bono work. For example, many U.S. law schools expressly authorize salaried full time law professors who are admitted to the practice of law to have a paid private practice up to a certain number of hours per year as a fringe benefit in addition to the salary, akin to the common practice of allowing professors to retain for themselves textbook royalties for textbooks written while the professors were being paid a salary to do scholarly work including writing textbooks. The pro bono program structure used in private law firms for their salaried employers isn't as workable for a salaried attorney working full time for a governmental employer. This is because allowing a government salaried employee to work for free for a private citizen on something that doesn't involve public business of the government would functionally be an indirect appropriation of legal salary funds from the governmental entity to the pro bono client without receiving authorization from the elected representatives of the government in question. So, in the public sector, a more common arrangement would be to provide that every salaried public sector lawyer working for that government is permitted to do up to X billable hours of pro bono work per year for their own, personal moonlighting private practice clients as a fringe benefit of employment, much like paid time off, if it is permitted at all. And, other public sector employers, which are not so generous, simply prohibit their salaried attorney employees from doing pro bono work at all in order to avoid having to deal with and think about the issue. This doesn't arise very often in the case of lawyers hired by small local governments or on a contract basis by a larger government for a particular specialized task, as they have their own practices and have not agreed to provide substantially all of their professional legal work to their employer the way that a salaried lawyer would. So they are more akin to private sector law firm lawyers who simply have an additional set of conflict of interest considerations as a result of having a particular local government as an employer.
A summary is here: see for example Section 35 of the Judiciary Act of 1789: 'in all the courts of the United States, the parties may plead and manage their own causes personally or by the assistance of counsel'. In the same vein, Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269 held that "an accused, in the exercise of a free and intelligent choice and with the considered approval of the court, may waive trial by jury, and so, likewise, may waive his constitutional right to the assistance of counsel". In Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 it is held that this extends (via the 14th) to state courts. As to the expression "practice law", maybe the meaning of this expression is taken to be self-evident, though clearly it is not. Statutes that prohibit that act for non-lawyers generally specify things such as "for another person" or "holds himself out as entitled to practice law".
Other than the most exceptional cases, no... As a citizen (of any country), you are entitled to consular support but that does not extend to your country hiring a lawyer for you or representing you in court. It covers such things as facilitating communication with your family, attempting to ensure the trial is fair and repatriation at the end of your sentence - usually with you paying for your own transport. In exceptional cases, it is not outside the realm of possibilities that secretaries, ministers or their respective departments of foreign affairs get involved one may receive a representative. …but Citizenship is irrelevant to have the right to representation. In most liberal democracies, you are entitled to legal representation, in most autocratic dictatorships, you aren't, and there are a large number of steps in between. How this works depends on local law and custom but it usually works the same for citizens and non-citizens. In most jurisdictions you find, hire and pay for your own lawyer. Some jurisdictions may provide a lawyer for you without payment by you. How this works varies. For example, if you are accused of a crime in the united-states you are entitled to a lawyer that you pay for or, if you can't afford one, the state will provide one for you. In australia, this extends to civil and administrative matters as well subject to a means test, however, you are not entitled to free legal representation even if you are destitute - you are entitled to a fair trial which, depending on the circumstances, may mean the state pays for a lawyer. In china the state appoints a lawyer for you and you are not entitled to another - defendants rarely win in China. Each country may or may not make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens: the three above don't.
I have encountered this problem in Pennsylvania. The PA Code requires a District Attorney to approve all private criminal complaints. If the DA declines to prosecute, then an affiant can petition the Court of Common Pleas to review the decision. However the affiant bears the burden of convincing the court that the DA abused his descretion in declining to prosecute, which is a pretty high hurdle. In the United States the only other legal appeal I am aware of is through federal courts under broad federal laws like 18 USC 242 or 42 USC 1983.
Almost certainly the answer to this is no because SB.8 talks of the $10K as being (minimum) statutory damages. (The actual provision 171.208(b)(2) is for damages &quot;not less&quot; than $10K, i.e. the court can award more in the first suit.) If e.g. someone breaks the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by making spurious claims against a group of people, they are each entitled to up to $1,000 statutory damages each (and class action is specifically allowed/mentioned). Generally, you can't avoid paying damages to an injured party by paying them to someone unrelated (before). There's nothing in SB.8 to suggest otherwise, the wording is: a court may not award relief under this section in response to a violation of Subsection (a)(1) or (2) if the defendant demonstrates that the defendant previously paid the full amount of statutory damages under Subsection (b)(2) in a previous action for that particular abortion performed Only proof of payment (not even having lost another suit on the same incident in another county) precludes a judge from awarding the statutory damages. (Claimants can file suits in their county of residence per 171.210, which me not knowing the Texas civil procedure too well, seem to allow multiple parallel lawsuits to proceed.) Now SB.8 is special in that limits relief to the first who sues (or maybe the first who wins) while enabling a very large class to claim injured status and sue... which in itself doesn't make a lot of sense when speaking of statutory damages, but it's a novel kind of relief, so who knows what courts may decide. (It would be interesting if a court determined that that first-claimant limit in SB.8 is unconstitutional, under either Texas or federal constitutions. In some other state laws, there is sometimes a limit on the total amount of damages out of a single incident, but it's not awarded on a first-winner basis, instead there's a provision to &quot;allocate to each claimant his equitable share of the total&quot;.) Granted a defendant could come with a legal strategy that look something like: when sued in Texas county arrange for a &quot;friendly&quot; organization (members) to immediately sue in another county. Fight the first lawsuit so as to delay judgement, but immediately concede the one from the &quot;friendly&quot; organization members, so that only the &quot;friendlies&quot; get the statutory damages (first), possibly e.g. donating them back to the defendant thereafter. Whether this would work really depends on details in the Texas civil procedure law, which I'm not too familiar with.
The Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct govern the issue of the grounds upon which lawyers admitted to practice in Texas may receive professional discipline such as censures, suspension from practice, or disbarment. The appropriate severity of professional discipline for particular kinds of conduct is largely a matter of case law and separate law provides for the procedural framework for administering the Rules of Professional Conduct. The Rules themselves specifically disavow the task of decided what kind if professional discipline is appropriate for any particular kind of conduct of an attorney. Personal ethics and behavior are governed primarily by rules 8.02 (defamatory speech about judges and other legal officials), and 8.04 (various kinds of misconduct including personal misconduct), although there are some stray bits that can come up in connection with other rules. Rule 1.08 involves improper conduct in transactions with clients that do not pertain to the matter in which the client is represented (e.g. unfair business deals with clients). Texas is among a minority of states that does not automatically treat having sex with client that commences only after the attorney-client relationship is formed as a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct. Rule 8.04 is sometimes called the &quot;officer and a gentleman&quot; clause of attorney professional ethics after an analogous provision, Article 113, of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies to members of the United States armed forces. It is a residual misconduct provision that covers lots of misconduct in a lawyer's personal affairs that isn't otherwise regulated by the Rules of Professional Conduct. Rule 8,04 and its official comments are as follows: Rule 8.04. Misconduct (a) A lawyer shall not: (1) violate these rules, knowingly assist or induce another to do so, or do so through the acts of another, whether or not the violation occurred in the course of a client-lawyer relationship; (2) commit a serious crime or commit any other criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyers honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects; (3) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation; (4) engage in conduct constituting obstruction of justice; (5) state or imply an ability to influence improperly a government agency or official; (6) knowingly assist a judge or judicial officer in conduct that is a violation of applicable rules of judicial conduct or other law; (7) violate any disciplinary or disability order or judgment; (8) fail to timely furnish to the Chief Disciplinary Counsels office or a district grievance committee a response or other information as required by the Texas Rules of Disciplinary Procedure, unless he or she in good faith timely asserts a privilege or other legal ground for failure to do so; (9) engage in conduct that constitutes barratry as defined by the law of this state; (10) fail to comply with section 13.01 of the Texas Rules of Disciplinary Procedure relating to notification of an attorneys cessation of practice; (11) engage in the practice of law when the lawyer is on inactive status, except as permitted by section 81.053 of the Government Code and Article XIII of the State Bar Rules, or when the lawyers right to practice has been suspended or terminated, including, but not limited to, situations where a lawyer’s right to practice has been administratively suspended for failure to timely pay required fees or assessments or for failure to comply with Article XII of the State Bar Rules relating to Mandatory Continuing Legal Education; or (12) violate any other laws of this state relating to the professional conduct of lawyers and to the practice of law. (b) As used in subsection (a)(2) of this Rule, “serious crime” means barratry; any felony involving moral turpitude; any misdemeanor involving theft, embezzlement, or fraudulent or reckless misappropriation of money or other property; or any attempt, conspiracy, or solicitation of another to commit any of the foregoing crimes. Comment: There are four principal sources of professional obligations for lawyers in Texas: these rules, the State Bar Act, the State Bar Rules, and the Texas Rules of Disciplinary Procedure (TRDP). All lawyers are presumed to know the requirements of these sources. Rule 8.04(a)(1) provides a partial list of conduct that will subject a lawyer to discipline. Many kinds of illegal conduct reflect adversely on fitness to practice law. However, some kinds of offenses carry no such implication. Traditionally in this state, the distinction has been drawn in terms of those crimes subjecting a lawyer to compulsory discipline, criminal acts relevant to a lawyer’s fitness for the practice of law, and other offenses. Crimes subject to compulsory discipline are governed by TRDP, Part VIII. In addition, although a lawyer is personally answerable to the entire criminal law, a lawyer should be professionally answerable only for criminal acts that indicate a lack of those characteristics relevant to the lawyer’s fitness for the practice of law. A pattern of repeated criminal acts, even ones of minor significance when considered separately, can indicate indifference to legal obligations that legitimately could call a lawyer’s overall fitness to practice into question. See TRDP, Part VIII; Rule 8.04(a)(2). A lawyer may refuse to comply with an obligation imposed by law upon a good faith belief, openly asserted, that no valid obligation exists. The provisions of Rule 1.02(c) concerning a good faith challenge to the validity, scope, meaning or application of the law apply to challenges to legal regulation of the practice of law. Lawyers holding public office assume legal responsibilities going beyond those of other citizens. A lawyer’s abuse of public office can suggest an inability to fulfill the professional role of attorney. The same is true of abuse of positions of private trust. With respect to the portion of the question asking: What personal kinds of personal misconduct might result in such penalties? Some of the most serious violations of the rules that are likely to lead to disbarment include misappropriation of client property, abandonment of a legal practice with active clients, revealing highly prejudicial client confidences with no color of justification for doing so, committing a crime involving fraud or a felony, or failure to cooperate with a disciplinary investigation. Of those, committing of a crime involving fraud or a felony would be the one most likely to result in disbarment that involves personal conduct, as opposed to professional conduct. Other kinds of personal conduct might result in a lesser sanction, however, as noted in Rule 8.4. Of course, it isn't all that hard to imagine some circumstance &quot;involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation&quot; (think &quot;George Santos&quot; absent any criminal conduct) that isn't strictly speaking a crime, or &quot;conduct constituting obstruction of justice&quot; in a matter unrelated to client matters (e.g. obstructing an investigation of a family member of the lawyer in connection with an academic institution's investigation) that could rise to this level as well. But, again, the matching of punishment to particular conduct is rooted in case law. Also, a pattern of various kinds of misconduct or repeat offenses are often treatment more seriously than a single instance of misconduct by a first offender would be in isolation. Incidentally, every U.S. jurisdiction has a set of Rules of Professional Conduct with the same numbering system, although the substantive content of different states' rules with the same number is not always the same. So, for example, Rule 8.4 covers the same subject-matter in every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and every other U.S. territory, even though there may be important substantive differences between the versions of Rule 8.4 adopted in different states.
The State of California is not responsible for injuries committed by private citizens Sorry to hear about your friend. Jamal may have a case (although the scope is narrow and timeframes are strict and tight) if someone employed by the state didn't do what they should have done. There is a whole raft of rules and regulations surrounding child welfare and Jamal would need to demonstrate exactly what they did that they shouldn't have done or what they should have done that they didn't do to have any basis for a claim. You will note that there is an obligation to make assessments -if they didn't make an assessment, they might be liable; if they made the wrong assessment, they aren't. Contested child welfare cases are difficult - caseworkers and social worlkers are presented with a lot of contradictory information and outright lies and the law accepts that if they make a good faith attempt to do their job, they haven't done anything wrong even if they make the wrong call. As for the court &quot;assuming&quot; anything, that is simply not true. The court would have heard the evidence (contested and contradictory no doubt) and made a judgement based on that evidence. It may have been the objectively wrong judgement but it was a perfectly legal one. In any event, you can't sue the court for a wrong judgement, you can only appeal it to a higher court subject to the time limits and your ability to pay. As a practical matter, child protection services are generally chronically underfunded, understaffed and overworked as are the courts that deal with such cases. A typical caseworker might have to deal with 50-100 cases similar to your friend every week - that gives them 5-15 minutes to (partially) read the file and try to decide what's best for the child. Sad to say, your friend is one of the lucky ones - came out the other end with a good relationship with one of his parents, isn't dead, isn't a drug addict and isn't homeless. And no, you can't sue the state for things being the way they are: that's what the voters want because if it isn't they'd elect politicians who would change it.
This is not legal advice, It is not even primarily a legal opinion. It is a legal position. The lawyer, acting on behalf of the agency from which you requested information, is giving the reasons why that agency is declining your request. The lawyer is presumably either an employee of the agency, or has the agency as a client. In any case, this is notice of the position that the agency would be likely to adopt if you took further legal action, such as a suit to compel disclosure. Lawyers provide such position statements ion behalf of clients or employers all the time. Such statements indicate why certain action is taken, what basis the client or employer has for taking or not taking certain action, and often indicate the nature of the defenses or theories that will be used should a lawsuit follow, although the client or employer is free to change the theory at the pleading stage. Not only is it not unethical for the lawyer to respond in this way, the agency is, I am fairly sure, required by the law to provide a valid reason when a request is declined. That is what they have done, provide a reason that they claim is valid, with some legal reasoning about why it is valid. Note that I express no view on whether the reason given is in fact valid, or would be sustained in a suit. That would be a different question.