PROVIDENCE -- A federal judge has censured a high profile attorney for making false statements in court documents he and two other lawyers filed while representing the mother of a slain black Providence police officer.U.S. District Judge Mary Lisi said attorney Barry Scheck, who helped defend football star O.J. Simpson in his murder trial, violated a federal rule by filing the false statements during the wrongful-death case of Leisa Young, the mother of a black sergeant who was off-duty and in plain clothes when he was mistaken for a suspect and shot by two white patrolmen.
Young had sued the city of Providence, its police department and top police officials for $20 million, claiming haphazard police training caused her son's death.
Lisi said no sanctions were warranted against Young's two other lawyers, Rhode Island attorney Robert Mann and Scheck's New York associate Nick Brustin, The Providence Journal reported.
During the trial, Lisi tossed Scheck (pictured left) and Brustin (pictured, right) from the case, saying they filed papers that included misrepresentations of her previous orders and statements, and misrepresentations of their own actions.
The case proceeded with Mann as Young's sole attorney. But Lisi dismissed the case in November after a jury decided that one of the patrolmen who shot Sgt. Cornel Young Jr. violated his civil rights, but the other patrolman did not.
Lisi wrote in Wednesday's order that the blatancy of Scheck's violation and his "continued insistence that he has done nothing wrong require action from this court.''
Scheck and Lisi clashed repeatedly during the case, with Lisi issuing several warnings to Scheck about his conduct.
He told the court that in practicing law across the country, he has "never knowingly made a misrepresentation of fact or law to any court or judge, and I have not done so in this case.''
Stephen M. Prignano, a lawyer representing Scheck and Brustin, said he will appeal Lisi's ruling.
Scheck and another attorney in the Simpson case, Peter Neufeld, created the Innocence Project in 1992 at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School in New York.
The project seeks DNA tests to clear people wrongly convicted of crimes. It has helped trigger the exoneration of 142 wrongly convicted people across the country, according to its Web site.
Scheck has been involved in several high profile cases. He helped represent the family of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, who says he was tortured by New York police, and he conducted DNA analysis in the unsolved JonBenet Ramsey murder case.
According to Lisi, the memo filed in the Young case misrepresented the judge's statements about a diagram of the shooting scene. Lisi noted the memorandum was drafted by a young lawyer in Scheck's firm, who she said had no firsthand knowledge of facts.
"Mr. Scheck utterly failed in his obligation to make sure that his pleadings contained only those factual assertions that were true to the record,'' she wrote.
Lisi said it "would serve no purpose'' to sanction Mann, a Providence lawyer, saying his only error was to sign a poorly drafted document. Lisi also said sanctions were unnecessary against Brustin because "he was taking direction from Mr. Scheck during the course of trial.''
A lawyer for Mann had no comment.
This doesn't have anything to do with the Ramsey case BUT - it goes to show that "legal secretaries" and associates who have no real knowledge of facts can - and do - actually come up with reports and documents that others take as fact.
We know from the Bonita papers ... Oh yeah.
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