Law grad seeks to take the bar exam despite conviction for sex-related offenses in 1998
A former Army officer is urging the Ohio Supreme Court to allow him to take the bar exam despite the fact that he was convicted by a military court after trying to set up meetings for sex with underage girls.
The court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in the case of John Tynes, who was convicted after his 1998 arrest in an FBI sting operation, the Associated Press reports. He served 19 months in a military prison.
At the time of his arrest, Tynes had traveled to Chicago in the belief he would meet a girl for sex there who was younger than 15, according to a panel report (PDF) by the Board of Commissioners on Character and Fitness. The board adopted the report in April and recommended that Tynes not be allowed to apply to the bar.
That same year, before his arrest, Tynes tried without success to persuade two other girls to meet him for sex, the hearing panel found. One was a 13-year-old girl in Louisville, Kentucky, who told Tynes she couldn’t meet him because she was grounded by her parents, and the second was a female Tynes believed to be a minor. She also refused to meet him. A search of Tynes’ home turned up computer pornography with images of minors, the hearing panel said.
Tynes applied to 20 law schools in 2010 and found just one that would admit him—Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. He had fully disclosed his conviction and incarceration on his law school applications. He has never been charged with any other offenses. Although he was required to register as a sex offender in some states he’d previously lived in, he is not required to do so in Ohio, the AP reports.
Tynes argues he has been rehabilitated and the public would not be jeopardized by allowing him to practice law. The Board of Commissioners relied too heavily on an assumption that allowing a convicted sex offender to be a lawyer would undermine public confidence in the legal profession “and not enough on the man before it and the character he currently possesses,” according to a brief filed by Tynes’ lawyer.
The Cincinnati Bar Association’s attorney Paul McCartney disagreed in a court filing, writing, “There are simply some actions that should preclude an individual from ever practicing law in the State of Ohio.”
