Court says attorney also lied on loan modification app
By Steve Lash
The Daily Record Newswire
BALTIMORE - Maryland's top court has disbarred an attorney who secretly altered her child-custody agreement before handing it to her soon-to-be ex-husband to sign and lied to the court and opposing counsel in her divorce case.
The Court of Appeals decried Shauntese Curry Trye's "pattern of dishonesty or misrepresentation" in unanimously handing down the ultimate professional sanction last week, noting she also lied on a loan modification application and failed to file income tax returns for four years.
"There is a saying, sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client," Judge Robert N. McDonald wrote for the court. "A corollary, perhaps, is that such a client has a lawyer who may be blinded by self-interest to the standards of professional conduct."
McDonald added that Trye "made some unfortunate choices" that resulted in her disbarment.
Bar Counsel Glenn M. Grossman, the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission's chief prosecutor of wayward attorneys, hailed the court's decision.
"Ms. Trye's dishonest behavior is well documented in Judge McDonald's opinion," Grossman said in an email.
Trye, who was a solo practitioner, did not return a telephone message seeking comment. An aide who answered the phone at Trye's office said she was not due to return until next week.
Granville Templeton III, Trye's attorney before the high court, did not return telephone and email messages seeking comment.
Of all her dishonest acts, Trye "most egregiously" changed the language of the custody agreement from shared physical custody to primary physical custody by the mother, according to findings made by Baltimore City Circuit Judge Videtta Brown, whom the high court had assigned to review the commission's allegations of misconduct by Trye.
Trye then handed the document to her estranged husband on Oct. 3, 2013, according to Brown's findings. The husband and his attorney, Michael Hamburg, signed the document - assuming it reflected the agreement reached a day earlier - and filed it in Baltimore County Circuit Court. After discovering the alteration, the husband and Trye returned to court with their attorneys Oct. 8 and signed a document reflecting their agreement for shared physical custody.
Brown also found that Trye made misrepresentations to the Baltimore County Circuit Court on June 6, 2013, when she said at a hearing that she had not received documents from a mortgage company that Hamburg had requested through discovery. Trye had in fact attached those documents to a prior pleading, according to Brown.
Trye later said she had emailed those documents to Hamburg but failed to produce evidence of that email when ordered to by the judge who presided at the June 6 hearing.
That judge later ordered Trye to produce documents requested by Hamburg and to attend a July 19, 2013, deposition - both of which Trye failed to do, Brown found. In September 2013, the court ordered sanctions against Trye and an award of attorney's fees to her estranged husband, Brown found.
In a matter unrelated to her divorce and custody proceedings, Trye stated on a loan modification application that her home on Idylwood Road was her primary residence, when in fact she had rented the property to tenants whom she instructed to make rental payments directly to her bank account rather than cutting her a check, Brown found.
Such behavior involves "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" in violation of Rule 8.4(c) of the Maryland Lawyers' Rules of Professional Conduct, the Court of Appeals said.
Trye, whose divorce became final on April 23, also failed to file federal and state income tax returns in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013. Though not willful, Trye's failure "to comply with a legal obligation common to all citizens for an extended period of time is conduct that reflects negatively on the legal profession" and is therefore sanctionable under Rule 8.4(d), the high court held.
Published: Mon, Aug 03, 2015
