Many States Fail The Test   

State bar disciplinary committees are so secretive it is difficult to gauge whether their public moments are really public. An example of how they try to soft-shoe around an issue: 41 percent of the states polled by HALT said they hold public hearings, yet all but three of them keep complaints and records secret until after discipline is recommended or imposed.

To assess the openness of each bar counsel, I graded them on their responses to three of the 84 questions HALT posed in its survey:

Are complainants guaranteed immunity?

Are private reprimands issued?

At what point does a file become open to the public?

Based on this criteria, the best system would be one in which complainants are promised immunity from retaliation (e.g., a libel lawsuit) by the accused attorney; all discipline is public and each complaint is made public as soon each complaint is made public as soon as it's filed. Thus a state such as Oregon, which could respond "yes – no – when the complaint was filed" got an A.

While Oregon's the valedictorian, Florida, Kansas and West Virginia managed to pull off respectable A- ratings. Six states earned a B: California, Connecticut, Idaho, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin. Ten got a D: Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.

A whopping 23 got an F: Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. (Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey and South Dakota did not respond to HALT's survey.)
Class average: D.

– M.C.