Absolutely everything about this story is downright insane, so of course it happened in Cleveland. Attorney John B. Frenden was disbarred by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2016 for a variety of professional misconduct claims, including failing to deliver funds promptly and engaging in a sexual relationship with a stripper he represented.
All in a days work.
But it’s the bizarre tragedy that took place a couple months later, and Frenden’s role in it, that makes you wonder how this guy was barred in the first place.
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Frenden testified yesterday in the involuntary manslaughter case against his friend Steven Leannais. Leannais hosted a party in December 2016 for Frenden, Frenden’s girlfriend, and Anthony Stanford. For some reason, Leannais streamed the party on Facebook Live, a move that’s dumb enough if you’re gearing up for Settlers of Catan, but takes on an extra level of dumb when your party plans are “playing with a gun” while drinking Vodka and Mountain Dew. From Cleveland.com:
The video, which was played in court Thursday, showed Frenden, then 45 years old, playing around first with a decorative sword and then with the gun, which Leannais left out on the counter. Frenden acted out a robbery and joked about “busting a cap” in someone. The video also showed Leannais then snatched the gun from Frenden and unloaded it. He pointed it to the ground and pulled the trigger to make sure it was unloaded.
Were they on the first floor? Because otherwise “pointing it to the ground and pull[ing] the trigger” is a terrible way to check that a gun isn’t loaded.
The video stops around this point.
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Later, and for reasons yet to be revealed, a bullet ended up in that gun and Anthony Stanford was shot and ultimately died of this wound.
After the shooting, Stanford ran out of the apartment bleeding, Leannais ran after him, and Frenden and his girlfriend left the apartment, which I would flag as probably a mistake but this issue-spotter is hairy enough without stopping to identify everything. Frenden testified that at this point he reached out to Leannais and asked him to delete the video. Is that an attempt to tamper with evidence?
“I told him to delete it because my face was on it acting like a jerk, not to delete any evidence,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about it.”
No, that doesn’t fly. If the problem was acting like a jerk on video, he’d have objected to it before it was filmed. He wanted the video deleted “because my face was on it acting like a jerk with a weapon that ultimately killed someone.”
And if that wasn’t enough, Frenden’s testimony threw another curveball:
And the day after the shooting, Frenden admitted that he used his revoked bar license number to check into the Cleveland city jail as an attorney and visited Leannais, and the two discussed deleting the video again.
So much for that “in the heat of the moment I asked for something stupid” defense. Frenden hasn’t been charged with anything at this point, but in a world of prosecutorial overreach, this seems like remarkably low-hanging fruit.
For a kicker, Leannais’s attorney pressed Frenden on his disbarment. Here’s what he said:
Christman hammered Frenden with several questions about his disbarment, which came after a disciplinary panel found he mishandled his clients’ money and had sex with a stripper who was a client of his in a custody case.
Frenden, who said he is unemployed now, said he disagreed with the findings and plans to seek reinstatement in the Bar so he can practice law.
Yeah… I kind of think admitting “I impersonated an attorney in an effort to destroy evidence in a manslaughter case” will put the kibosh on readmittance.
But it’s Cleveland so who knows.
Disgraced lawyer present during Cleveland dinner party killing told shooter to delete Facebook Live video [Cleveland.com]
Ohio Supreme Court disbars Cleveland lawyer John Frenden for misconduct involving clients [Cleveland.com]
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.