Crime, Legal Ethics

Law Student Allegedly Involved In Torture Plot Becomes Lawyer

You too can pass character and fitness -- even if you're alleged to be part of a torture case.

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shutterstock_296444639Lots of prospective lawyers worry about the passing the required character and fitness review, concerned some minor youthful indiscretion will cost them their dream of being a lawyer. If you’re a law student currently fretting that you’ve taken out $200k in loans and may not be able to actually practice law because of a traffic ticket from 2010, a recent case from California should give you some hope.

Meet Cortney Shegerian. Police allege that while attending Whittier Law School she conducted surveillance on a man that her now ex-husband, Hossein Nayeri, is accused of torturing. As the Los Angeles Times reports, it was a particularly gruesome crime:

Prosecutors said Nayeri and two other attackers abducted a pot-dispensary owner from a Newport Beach home, drove him to the desert, tortured him with a butane torch, shocked him with a Taser and cut off his penis.

Yikes, that doesn’t sound good at all.

Shegerian describes an abusive relationship with Nayeri, and when police confronted her with their evidence she decided to cooperate with law enforcement. She even participated in an elaborate plot to capture her ex after he’d fled the country, risking her life to see that Nayeri was brought to justice. (He actually escaped from prison last month, and Shegerian’s life was put in peril again, as many assumed Nayeri was after revenge on his ex-wife.) Justice is now a little closer to being served, but the question many have, as the Los Angeles Times notes, is how exactly she passed that pesky character and fitness review.

To be clear, the California state bar will not disclose or discuss the particulars of Shegarian’s case, but that doesn’t stop folks from speculating on how she is barred:

“Something like this usually is disclosed,” said Robert Hawley, who recently retired as the bar’s deputy executive director, and who had no role in the case. “I think people would say that’s serious enough to disclose it and explain it.”

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It also makes sense that given the likely attention such a sensational case would have received, you’d want to be upfront about it. If a Google search is going to bring up your name in a negative (and potentially illegal) light, you want to be ahead of it when dealing with your bar admission.

Patrick Dixon, who served eight years on a bar committee that examines problematic candidates for admission, said her case likely would have been subjected to such a review if bar officials knew her alleged history. He said he did not recall the case and does not believe he was ever involved in deciding her admission.

The fact that she helped police and may have been abused by her former husband would have been considered mitigation, he said. Being candid about her history also would have helped her, he said.

See, the character and fitness czars can be compassionate! So the takeaway is to be honest and provide as many reasons as possible for whatever crazy sh!t you did. Then you too may just get to be a real-life lawyer. Yay?

Police say she helped her husband, who is accused in a grisly torture plot. How did she become a lawyer? [Los Angeles Times]

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