Legal Ethics
Mass. Justices Ask Why Jailed Lawyer Can’t Explain Client’s Lost Cash
Posted Jun 10, 2009, 12:30 pm CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
A disbarred lawyer who says he’s in debtor’s prison took his quest to win release to Massachusetts’ highest court yesterday.
Justices on the Supreme Judicial Court asked why the former lawyer, Richard Birchall, hasn’t explained what he did with millions of dollars entrusted to him for safekeeping by a client in the 1990s, the Cape Cod Times reports. Birchall has been in prison for more than two years because he still owes $2.7 million to the former client but says he can’t repay the money.
Birchall’s brief argues he is trapped in debtor’s prison despite a lack of any evidence that he has the assets, according to a separate story in the Cape Cod Times. He was jailed because of a judge’s contempt ruling.
Birchall’s former client, Suzanne D'Amour, gave the lawyer $2.8 million that she got in life insurance assets after the murder of her husband, a dentist and supermarket heir. She was acquitted of the murder but convicted of lying to a grand jury about the slaying, the story says.
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