A disciplinary panel’s public censure of District Attorney Carol Chambers for using her official power to meddle in a friend’s civil lawsuit is punishment well-deserved.
Chambers, who should consider herself lucky for getting off so lightly, would do well to apologize for her lapse in judgment, pledge to do better and get on with the business of prosecuting bad guys. Instead, she remains unrepentant.
“I was censured for asking questions,” Chambers said, according to KMGH-Channel 7. “I can’t even do the most basic of investigations. … District attorneys cannot let that sit.”
We said it before and we’ll say it again: If Carol Chambers doesn’t recognize the ethical boundaries she has breached, that is a deep-seated problem. It’s perhaps more dangerous than the forceful call she made to a pesky bill collector.
The incident began when Chambers threatened to unleash a grand jury on a collections lawyer who had filed a civil lawsuit against an acquaintance. It should come as no surprise that Chambers and the friend whose interests she was protecting, Laurett Barrentine, are prominent Arapahoe County Republicans.
Barrentine, an Englewood City Council member, was an identity-theft victim who was being pursued – wrongly so – by Jonathan Steiner, a collections lawyer. Chambers misrepresented the number of complaints she had gotten about Steiner, saying there were many when there actually was just one. She threatened to investigate him with a grand jury.
The hearing board, comprised of lawyers Edwin Kahn and Richard Holme and presiding disciplinary judge William Lucero, bent over backward in their 17-page ruling to ascribe the best motives to Chambers. They even surmised that she must have misspoken when she said there were “numerous complaints” about the collections lawyer. That is a stretch afforded to a member of the bar for 21 years in good standing. And it is one that she apparently does not appreciate.
The board found that Chambers “effectively placed her finger on the scales of justice on behalf of one party to a civil case,” and that she acted “precipitously and negligently” in confronting Steiner.
The order is unlikely to be the last word on the topic. We’re confident voters in the 18th Judicial District, which encompasses Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, will deliver their own verdict on the propriety of Chambers’ actions when she is up for re-election in 2008.
