Public-domain · open source
OpenJurist

469 So. 2d 142

469 So.2d 142

10 Fla.L.Weekly 301

Docket No. 85-81.

Dolan v. State

Michael Joseph DOLAN, Appellant, v. The STATE of Florida, Appellee.

District Court of Appeal of Florida

Decided January 29, 1985.

District Court of Appeal of Florida · decided 1985-01-29

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“We emphasize that we are not here dealing with a person who merely failed to comply with some administrative requirement prerequisite to membership in the Florida Bar. Rather, we are dealing with a situation where one without proper credentials as a lawyer in any state or federal jurisdiction posed as a lawyer. And, he who so posed has not been considered to be of sufficient moral fiber to bear the stamp of approval of the Florida Bar. Here, there was an actual and knowing misrepresentation on the part of Pearce to his client.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including State v. Joubert

Relies on Florida Bar · United States v. Hoffman · Johnson v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1985-01-29

How this case has been cited

Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently November 2024

11 state decisions

3019851990200020102020decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1*143 Michael Joseph Dolan, in pro. per.

¶2Jim Smith, Atty. Gen., for appellee.

¶3Before BARKDULL, NESBITT and DANIEL S. PEARSON, JJ.

¶4DANIEL S. PEARSON, Judge.

¶5We affirm the trial court's order which denied as facially insufficient the defendant's Rule 3.850 motion to vacate his conviction and sentence.

¶6The defendant's motion alleges that he was denied the effective assistance of counsel in that his court-appointed attorney was, throughout the entirety of the representation of the defendant including the trial, suspended as a member of the Florida Bar because of the attorney's failure to pay required bar dues. Because the defendant claims no other ineffectiveness, he necessarily asks us to adopt a rule that an attorney who acts on behalf of a criminal defendant during critical stages of the proceedings, while suspended from the right to engage in the practice of law because of his failure to pay bar dues, is per se ineffective.

¶7We decline to adopt the rule urged by the defendant. An attorney who is suspended from the Florida Bar for failure to pay the dues required by Article VIII, Florida Bar Integration Rule, is automatically entitled to reinstatement upon the filing of his petition and the payment of the dues. The Florida Bar (In re Steinbach),427 So.2d 733 (Fla. 1983); Thomson v. The Florida Bar,260 So.2d 495 (Fla. 1972). Where, as here, the suspension is unrelated to any disciplinary proceeding and the act of reinstatement is purely ministerial, see Thomson v. The Florida Bar,260 So.2d at 497, the suspended status of the attorney simply has no bearing on his ability to effectively represent a criminal defendant. Beto v. Barfield,391 F.2d 275 (5th Cir.1968); Johnson v. State,225 Kan. 458, 590 P.2d 1082 (1979); Hill v. State,393 S.W.2d 901 (Tex. Crim. App. 1965). See also United States v. Hoffman,733 F.2d 596 (9th Cir.1984). We emphasize that we are here "dealing with a person who merely failed to comply with some administrative prerequisite to membership in the Florida Bar," the person expressly exempted from the holding in Huckelbury v. State,*144337 So.2d 400, 403 (Fla. 2d DCA 1976), upon which the defendant relies.

¶8Affirmed.

/469/so2d/142 · .json · Public domain