Silence

Sometimes folks can be a wee bit too contentious.

There is plenty of unjustness in this world and one doesn't need to make controversy or run to causes to find them in an attempt to correct them.

I hope you get your house in order, James.

Contentious lawyer is silenced for now
Brian Chasnoff and Graeme Zielinski: Express-News

Citing numerous instances of professional misconduct, the State Bar of Texas this month suspended local civil rights attorney James Myart Jr., a once acid-tongued critic of law enforcement who in recent months has fallen conspicuously silent.

The three-year suspension, beginning May 1, will commence about three weeks before Myart, 54, is scheduled to face trial in state district court on an unrelated charge of aggravated perjury.

On Oct. 31, he'll be placed on probation for 30 months.

Myart agreed April 1 to the judgment, which marks the fourth time in less than a decade that the association has sanctioned the attorney. In 1999, he was suspended for four years, also for numerous instances of professional misconduct.

A regularly caustic presence in the past for reporters and city officials, Myart has been difficult to find in recent days. Absent in court, his clients have been compelled to hire new counsel. His home, office and cell phones have been disconnected, his law office shuttered and the blinds drawn on the windows of his East Side house.

Reached outside his home Monday, Myart appeared disheveled and dejected. He declined to comment on his suspension or anything else.
"I've destroyed myself, you know that," he said.

An attorney since the mid-1980s, Myart has represented a number of high-profile clients, including former Georgia Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney, as well as residents who claimed that local law enforcement officers had violated their civil rights.

In an interview last year, Myart said his suspension in 1999 drove him to depression and drunkenness.

The bulk of the findings cited in the most recent suspension stem from a lawsuit in which a homeowners association sued a San Antonio couple for fees owed. The couple, Bennie and Maxine Tate, retained Myart in 2005 to represent them in the case.
"He had us thinking he was going to do the right thing," Bennie Tate said.

On the first day of the trial, Myart requested that it be reset. A judge denied the request. Two days later, Myart appeared before the judge and said he'd transferred the case to federal court, records stated.

But Myart never filed the necessary pleadings, and when the case again came to trial, in 2006, Myart did not appear in court or notify his clients of the trial's date, according to the bar association's findings.

As a result, the Tates were ordered to pay the homeowners association more than $20,000 in attorney fees.

Myart also failed to refund "unearned" attorney fees the Tates had paid him in advance, according to the findings.

Tate said Myart requested a payment of $5,000 in one week, and the disabled Vietnam veteran was able to scrape together $4,000. After that, Myart was virtually impossible to find, he said.
"He wasn't there for appointments. He didn't return calls or anything," Tate said. "We'd go by his office, they'd say he wasn't in."

Myart has agreed to pay back the Tates $2,000.

The bar association also cited Myart's behavior at a 2007 coroner's inquest in Las Vegas. Not authorized to practice law in Nevada or ask questions at the inquest, Myart wrote down questions and asked others to adopt them as their own, the association found.

Myart said, "'These are just poor ignorant black folks who don't understand how to ask these questions,'" said D. Lanny Waite, the hearing's officer, who eventually ordered Myart out of the courtroom. "But when they started writing their own questions, they were better and more on point than the questions I got from him."

Myart also "created numerous disruptions in the coroner's inquest by his comments, facial gestures, grunts and groans," the judgment stated.