Legal Advocate Awaits Ruling : Lawyer Who Won Rights for Disabled May Be Disbarred

SAN FRANCISCO —  Over the years, Mason Rose V gained wide acclaim for his zealous legal advocacy of the rights of the disabled, including a landmark case he won before the California Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, Rose, a 52-year-old Rolling Hills lawyer who himself is paraplegic, was back before the justices--but this time trying to avoid disbarment on far-ranging charges of professional misconduct.

Rose’s attorney, in an ironic bid for leniency, argued that Rose’s unbounded dedication to the cause of the disabled led him to neglect his clients. The resulting stress was exacerbated by a disintegrating marriage with a wife who “could not accept” Rose’s handicap, the lawyer said.

“He didn’t have as much time as he needed for the practice of law,” Santa Ana attorney David A. Clare told the justices. “His misconduct here involves procrastination and failure to act . . . but there’s no dishonesty.” While a one-year suspension might be justifiable, disbarment would be “excessive,” Clare said.

But Diane C. Yu, counsel for the State Bar, said the ultimate penalty of disbarment was necessary to protect the public and maintain confidence in the profession.

Yu argued that Rose had committed a decade-long series of improper actions involving half a dozen clients “before, during and after” his bout with emotional stress.

Among other things, he failed to properly serve clients, withheld money to which one client was entitled and entered into a business deal with another client, a just-widowed mother of two, without disclosing his own financial stake and his potential conflict of interest, Yu said.

While the attorney’s work for the disabled was “very laudable,” these other clients--some of them handicapped--had suffered substantially, she said.

Rose’s case, to be decided within 90 days, poses one of the most unusual disciplinary disputes to come before the justices in recent years.

A former captain of his college football team and fighter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, Rose suffered paralyzing spinal injuries in 1965 when he ejected from a jet that crashed. Later, he attended law school, went into legal practice, co-founded the Western Law Center for the Handicapped and served on several state and national groups representing the disabled. He also was a member of the Rolling Hills City Council and held two one-year terms as mayor.

As a lawyer, he brought suits that resulted in improving access for the handicapped to the Los Angeles Music Center and an estimated 30,000 leased offices of the U.S. Postal Service. In 1979, he won a milestone ruling from the state Supreme Court declaring that disabled parents could not be denied custody of their children solely because of their handicap--a case later dramatized in a movie for television.

But Rose ran into professional trouble in 1986 when the Bar charged him with eight counts of misconduct from 1976 to 1985. While a three-member hearing panel recommended a year’s suspension, the Bar’s 14-member Review Department urged disbarment, from which an attorney normally cannot seek reinstatement for at least five years.

In response, Rose conceded that in some instances he failed to properly serve his clients. But he denied any dishonesty and said any inattention to their needs was due to “burnout” from handling a large number of cases for the handicapped for free.

In perhaps the most serious charge, Rose was accused of improper dealings with a client whose husband, a Navy helicopter pilot, was killed in a crash. Rose was charged with inducing the woman to invest $70,000 from a settlement she won into a since-failed restaurant franchise, without his adequately disclosing his own interest in the venture. The Bar says Rose did not fully inform the woman that he would receive 25% of the company’s stock if he obtained her as an investor. Rose says he did fully inform her. (Meanwhile, in a separate court case, Rose was ordered by a federal judge to sell his home to cover the woman’s losses in the deal.)

In Wednesday’s hearing, questions by the justices reflected a variety of concerns in deciding what punishment, if any, Rose should receive.

One of them, Justice Edward A. Panelli, suggested that Rose could face a “real problem” for his dealings with the widow, who apparently was not aware of the full implications of her investment in the failed restaurant venture. “That is frankly what really troubles me about this case,” the justice said.

Rose watched the proceedings from a wheelchair in the spectator section of the courtroom. Afterward, he expressed hope that the court had recognized that any misconduct was largely attributable to the inordinate amount of time he spent on behalf of the handicapped.

“All this took place at a time when I was just overcommited,” he said. Previously, he said, he spent about 60% of his time working free for the disabled. Now, he added, he spends about 10% of his time on such activity.