A judge can credit misconduct yet still exonerate the lawyer who oversaw it.

Evidence

Another four months passed—four agonizing months for Schlichtmann—before Judge Skinner handed down his ruling. The judge found that Riley had committed perjury and that Mary Ryan was guilty of “deliberate misconduct” in failing to give Schlichtmann the Yankee report. The judge completely exonerated Facher. “I have no reason to doubt his testimony,” he wrote. “Mr. Facher is a trial lawyer of national reputation whose work I have observed in this court on a number of occasions. He has been well known locally for many years as a tough but meticulously ethical advocate.” … Nonetheless, wrote Judge Skinner, since Mary Ryan’s legal fees had been paid by Beatrice, and since she and Facher had worked closely together, any misconduct by her was therefore attributable to Beatrice. There would have to be further hearings. In these, the burden would lie upon Facher to prove that the misconduct of Mary Ryan had not “materially impaired” Schlichtmann’s development of a case against the tannery itself. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 3098

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the corpus’s recurring finding that institutional guardians of trust are themselves exempt from the standards they enforce — cf. The Social Control of Impersonal Trust on guardians needing ever-higher-order oversight.