William Lerach, the federal felon and infamous securities lawyer who in 2007 pled guilty to conspiracy about an alleged kickback scheme, who completed the confinement portion of his sentence, and now wants to teach a class at the University of California, Irvine School of Law about free-market capitalism to fulfill his community service requirement.
A federal probation office rejected the proposal, on the basis that a law school is not a community service organization, like a church or a soup kitchen. Lerach, represented by the law firm of his former law partner Patrick Coughlin, filed a motion last month with the U.S. District Court of Central California, asking the court to overturn that decision. The case heads to court today, Politico's Under the Radar blog reported.
Lerach course is titled “Regulation of Free Market Capitalism—Are We Failing?” Lerach would receive a $3,000 stipend to teach the course, according to his filing, and that moneywould be donated back to the UCI Foundation. There are discussions about posting the lectures on YouTube for the sake of anyone who would want to audit the course.
Lerach’s filing notes that the law school is a nonprofit institution, and he has already performed more than 600 hours of community service for groups including the Southern California German Shepherd Rescue and the La Jolla Historical Society.
U.S. district court judge John F. Walter weighed the request today. André Birotte, Jr, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, did not take a position on whether the court should allow Lerach to teach the course, Main Justice reported. In an early filing, he noted that if the permission is granted, only Lerach’s time spent discussing ethics and his own missteps should count toward fulfilling the sentence’s community service requirements.
My comment.
Lerach is the master at ferreting out Wall Street fraud. He made millions doing it, especially on the Enron case. There is a trade off. Who knows more about felonies than a convicted felon. He performed a good service but used foul means to fulfill the service. The example that comes to my mind is that the United States used Charles “Lucky” Luciano as an agent to assist the US in ferreting out the Nazis and Facists in Italy and Sicily during World War II. He was both a patriot and a thug. We used his patriotism and put away the thug. How is Lerach different? How is Michael Milkin different? How can we tell who is reformed and will benefit society in the future and who will remain a thug? If we take no chance we will never know.
I say take the chance.
Martin S Friedlander, Esq.
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