CROOKED LAWYER AS “NEEDY” PIG

Michael Sean Quinn*


Ronald Stallings was sentence to prison time, and more, this January, for filing applications for fees after having been found guilty by a jury of first degree theft from the Alabama Fair Trial Tax Fund, the purpose of which is to provide reasonable fees payable to lawyers who defend the indigent. 


The trouble was that Ron, shyster that he was, filed 246 false fee applications/declarations during the 6 year period running from 2006 to 2012. These were not cases where Lawyer Ronald charged too much or wrote him time down inflated.  Hid clients did not actually exist at all; nor did the cases.  He even dreamed up the cause numbers.

“Ronnie the Local Lout” had already been disbarred a couple of years ago.  This time around, he received a 15 “split-sentence.” Two years in the pen, five years on probation, required restitution of the whole tab, $328,246.50, and maybe some more on top of that.

It is relatively easy to draw a distinction between honorable crime (weed dealing, maybe, smuggling honey,  for sure, and no doubt stealing from mafiosi) and dishonorable crime, and then various grades of dishonorable crime.  Before you get down to crimes of violence, the mistreatment of children, and rapes of women (maybe men too in our age), there are dishonorable crimes in the stack, and this one is in that low category and down ant the bottom of it.  This is especially true is there was only a certain sum available for the defense of the really poor, and Ron took a bunch of it–$53,000 a year or so. 

One thing for sure, the classic W.C.Fields character joke does not apply to this case.  Daughter and Dad hang together and something has gone wrong. Daughter: “What are we going to do?” Dad: “We’ll steal from the rich and give to the poor. Daughter: “What poor?” Dad: “Us poor.” Audience laugh.  In terms of comedy, not law, a lawyer stealing from J.P.Morgan is amusing.  Ron’s escapades are not. 

There may be another dimension to this dreadful incident.  Let’s assume for a moment that Master Stalling is not a complete and total idiot. (As he certainly would be if he thought this could last forever.) Given my suggested assumption, there had to have been a conspiracy.  We live in the computer age. Even court clerks in laughed-at states like that of our criminal do not keep records with quills and pencils.  Hence, it seems obvious to me that someone was being  helpful here.  Now, I grant that there can be such a thing as “helpful negligence,” but does this case sound like that?

This matter must have been investigated.  How could the conspiracy have been missed. Surely, it is not Michael’s Myth.

*Michael Sean Quinn
Law Office of Michael Sean Quinn
+
Quinn and Quinn
1300 West Lynn #208
Austin, Texas 78703
(Resumes Attached to Website: www.michaelseanquinn.com)
(o) 512-296-2594
(c) 512-656-0503