The Constitutional Court has imposed a “warning” on the lawyer who signed a request for constitutional protection for having falsified citations of the court’s own jurisprudence. The fact has been communicated to the Barcelona Bar Association, to which the sanctioned lawyer belongs, “for the corresponding disciplinary purposes”. The guarantee body claims to have proven that the lawyer in question “failed in writing the due respect” to the magistrates of the First Chamber – which understood his appeal – and to the court as a whole “by having presented in several sections of said request the supposedly literal citation of passages from 19 sentences” of the guarantee body, “in quotation marks for this purpose, when it turns out that none of them were real”.
The adopted agreement explains that once it was verified that the doctrinal references were all unreal, the appeal was rejected due to the lack of justification of the requirement that the case had a special constitutional significance. At the same time, it was agreed to forward the matter to the six judges that make up the aforementioned First Chamber, which decided to open a disciplinary procedure against the lawyer who signed the application for protection. The court, in short, applied the Organic Law of the Judiciary and the organic law of the Constitutional Court itself in matters of courtroom police, for the possible “commission of professional misconduct consisting of lacking the respect due to the judges (…) with this procedure.”
A phase of allegations was then opened, which were made by the investigated lawyer and the prosecutor. After examining all the documentation, the adopted agreement has proven the falsity of the 19 doctrinal citations, ruling out that the reason given in his defense by the lawyer “was effective.” This reason consisted of alleging the misconfiguration of a database with jurisprudence that he had prepared on this matter. The Constitutional Court explains in its resolution that this rejection is due to the fact that the database was not provided nor was there any attempt to prove the veracity of what was alleged. The court also mentions that, above all, “whatever the cause of the inclusion of unreal citations (use of artificial intelligence, quotation marks of own arguments, etc.), the lawyer is always responsible for exhaustively reviewing all the content of this and any writing” that he presents in a constitutional process (in this case of amparo), correcting where appropriate what was wrong.
The agreement considers that the lack of due respect for the magistrates of the First Chamber and the court as an institution has been noted, “not in the form of insults or express disqualifications, but with clear disregard for the jurisdictional function that they perform, by attributing to them the knowledge of a series of quoted statements of constitutional doctrine that they should take for granted, when the same lacked any anchoring in reality”. This meant, according to the agreement, a disturbance of the work of the court (as the lawyer himself describes it), “not because of having to verify the veracity of each citation included in the claim, which is always done with all the writings and appeals, but because of having to judge the consequences of such unjustified irregularity, both at the procedural level and, in an extraordinary way also, at this sanctioning level”.
In order to determine the sanction applicable to this professional conduct (warning, or fine according to article 554.1 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary), the Court opts for the lesser, warning, “given the lawyer’s lack of previous records regarding other acts worthy of sanctioning reproach.” The court also argues that the seriousness of the lawyer’s conduct is “tempered by the impossibility of the unreal citations being effective” in terms of the admission and, where appropriate, estimation of the claim for protection, “since it is evident that their unreality would be exposed.” The agreement is signed by the President of the court, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, who is also President of its First Chamber.
What matters most is what happens closer to home. To make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
KEEP READING
#Constitutional #Court #sanctions #lawyer #false #court #citations #reinforce #appeal #protection