Attorney was suspended once before for income-tax evasion
By Kevin Featherly
BridgeTower Media Newswires
MINNEAPOLIS — In a case as interesting for its partial dissent as for its per curiam ruling, the Minnesota Supreme Court on Aug. 7 indefinitely suspended a St. Paul attorney who failed to show up for court and then lied about why he wasn’t there.
Bobby Gordon Okechuku Onyemeh Sea, a criminal, family and immigration law solo practitioner, may petition for reinstatement after 120 days. But he first must pass a professional responsibility exam, satisfy continuing education requirements and pay $900 in court costs, among other hurdles.
The case stems from an incident on April 18, 2017, during the trial of a first-degree sexual assault suspect Sea was defending.
Late that morning during a court recess, Sea left the Wright County District Court and traveled out of town. He later said he needed to fetch spare glasses from his St. Paul office because the ones he wore in court had broken and he couldn’t see.
The court recessed at 11:30 a.m. with plans to reconvene at 1:30 p.m. Sea didn’t arrive until 2:41 p.m., after the hearing adjourned. Two witnesses, a doctor and a social worker Sea had subpoenaed, were present after being ordered to attend the afternoon session.
The next day in court, Sea told the unidentified Wright County judge that his return was delayed by dense traffic on the way back from St. Paul.
The story wasn’t entirely true. While Sea might have retrieved new glasses in St. Paul, he eventually admitted that he really left Buffalo to attend a bail hearing for a second client in Dakota County, 72 miles away.
Sea never mentioned his trip to Hastings to the Wright County judge when she repeatedly asked for an explanation of his absence. He repeated that lie of omission three times in District Court, case records indicate.
By the time he stated it again on April 24, 2017, the trial judge knew he had been in Hasting, the Supreme Court’s Aug. 7 ruling indicates. The Wright County trial judge sanctioned him with a $1,712 fine, which Sea paid.
Exacerbating the situation, in the spring of 2017, Sea was still months from completing a two-year probation stemming from a 2012 federal income-tax evasion conviction. The state Supreme Court suspended him from practice for 20 months following that conviction, but reinstated him in late 2015 with two years’ probation.
After the Wright County incident, a complaint was filed with the Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board. Court referee Bruce Christopherson ruled against Sea on July 30, 2018, recommending a 120-day suspension that requires Sea to petition for reinstatement.
In briefings and in testimony before both the referee and the Supreme Court, Sea maintained that the broken-glasses story was true and that he never intentionally deceived the court. He asked for a more lenient 90-day suspension, partly on grounds that he had no previous violations related to his law practice.
That didn’t wash with Jennifer Bovitz, assistant director for the Office of Lawyers Responsibility, who argued the case before the Supreme Court on April 8, 2019.
She said the tax offense and the Wright County incident had a common cause—dishonesty that Sea “needs to wrap his head around.”
“This has happened before,” Bovitz told the court. “Mr. Sea has a fundamental disregard for the truth.”
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‘Merely human’
On Aug. 7, the state Supreme Court agreed.
“Sea’s misconduct, combined with the harm caused, his prior similar dishonest behavior, his probationary status and other aggravating factors, warrants significant discipline,” the court wrote in its 19-page per curiam ruling.
Most of the justices agreed with Christopherson that Sea’s long experience as an attorney (he was licensed in 1999), his ongoing probation, his intentional misconduct and his lack of remorse were all aggravating factors warranting a 120-day suspension.
But Justice Paul Thissen partly dissented. He agreed that Sea committed a serious offense and that there was at least one aggravating factor—Sea was still on probation. However, Thissen wrote in his 12-page partial dissent, Sea should be suspended for just 60 days.
That would allow for immediate reinstatement without the need to petition the court, he wrote, and he found that outcome appropriate.
“Lawyers are merely human and therefore imperfect,” he wrote.
In oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Sea said he thought the Wright County matter would wrap in the morning on April 18, 2017, giving him free rein to go to Hastings. He was surprised when the judge decided to reconvene later that day, he said.
The reason Sea needed to be in two courtrooms, he said, was because a woman whose husband was jailed for missing a court date called him for help on the previous evening, April 17.
Sea had helped the family previously in immigration matters, he said, and he wanted to help the jailed man, who does not speak English, get out of jail—which he did. Sea testified he was not paid for his work in Hastings.
Then, just as his plan was already breaking down because the Wright County judge ordered an afternoon hearing, his glasses broke, necessitating the side trip to St. Paul, Thissen’s partial dissent says.
“As is the case for all of us at some point or another, life happened and made things worse,” he wrote.
Sea testified that he didn’t realize the two courthouses were 72 miles apart and that when he left for Dakota County he still believed he had time to get back by 1:30 p.m. That was a “bad gamble,” Thissen wrote.
When Sea returned to court the next day and saw how angry the Wright County judge was, he told the Supreme Court, he kept quiet about his Dakota County sojourn.
“She was mad at me,” he testified. “So I just didn’t want to say anything. I thought it would be worse for me to say anything.” He admitted he was the wrong and had no excuse for his actions.
“I see a lawyer who knew that he made a mistake, panicked and did not tell the whole truth to cover up a messy situation,” Thissen wrote.
For the rest of the court, any such considerations fail to outweigh Sea’s misconduct, his selfish motives or the other aggravating factors.
Neither do they outweigh the harm Sea caused to the administration of justice, the lawyers and witnesses who showed for court or Sea’s criminal client, who had no idea where his lawyer was.
“Moreover, Sea’s dishonesty and failure to appear has also harmed public confidence in the legal system generally,” the court wrote in its per curiam opinion.
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‘Positive development’
William Wernz, a legal ethics expert and author of “Minnesota Legal Ethics: A Treatise,” said that he is not surprised that the Sea ruling came down as a semi-split decision.
Wernz is, however, a little surprised by the length of Thissen’s dissent. He also said that Thissen’s dissent over the suspension’s duration is a bit unusual.
Still, open debate and dissents are becoming more frequent in lawyer-discipline decisions, Wernz said. That on the whole is a positive development, he said, reflecting the court’s desire to more carefully analyze lawyer-discipline matters.
“I think the court should be applauded for caring and for giving that amount of attention to something that is inherently difficult,” he said. “They are trying to be consistent.”
For Sea, however, Wernz offers no applause. The lawyer has a past discipline record of criminal dishonesty, he said. Sea also repeatedly lied to a judge while on probation and exhibited behavior that impaired a court proceeding.
“That is really extremely serious misconduct,” he said.
