He represented Canada's most notorious serial killing sexual predator. Now he's on trial for hiding the films the killer made of his crimes. Attorney Kenneth Murray told the St. Catharine's Superior Court he didn't see the films as evidence of crime, but evidence for the defense of Paul Bernardo at his 1995 trial, claiming they would have shown Bernardo's then-wife the more culpable in the crimes. They show Bernardo and Karla Homolka assaulting several teenage girls. Bernardo had ordered Murray to recover - and not look at - the hidden films two years before the 1995 trial. Murray did look at them in 1993, but then Bernardo demanded they be hidden from authorities, which Murray refused. Meanwhile, while Murray held onto the films, Homolka cut a plea bargain with prosecutors, getting a manslaughter verdict and 12 years in prison in return for testifying against her husband - and there, published reports say, is the linchpin in the case against Murray. Prosecutors told the court the deal was made a month after Murray saw the films and the films could have smashed the plea deal - not to mention being the only material evidence against Bernardo, who was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life. Following a canceled preliminary hearing, Murray turned the tapes over to Bernardo's trial judge and removed himself from the case. Murray's attorney argues there was little if any guiding precedent on how Murray should have handled the tapes, other than examining evidence before turning them over.
OLYMPIA, Wa. - The debate before the bar, sort of, is whether an attorney should be punished for sleeping with a client. No, it's not a plotline on All My Children, it's a hot topic among Washington state attorneys after the state Supreme Court suspended former state bar president Lowell Halverson for a year the last week of April for having sex with a client. Published reports indicate this was the first time the Washington Supreme Court disciplined a lawyer for consensual sex. Some say the court wanted to make an example of Halverson, and duck drawing and adopting a general rule on the question, not to mention encroaching unreasonably on private lives of consenting adults. But others, including the state bar itself, say such consensual sex clouds judgment, makes a conflict of interest, and often ends up badly otherwise. Ten states already have rules against attorney-client sex, including neighboring Oregon, and the American Bar Association is mulling a ban for inclusion in its professional conduct rules.
TOLEDO, Ohio - Four self portraits of nude men and a woman were back on display at Owens Community College May 2, after they were pulled two days earlier from a student photography exhibit. The reversal came after signs advising of adult content were posted. "With appropriate signage, we do not censor student work," said vice president of academic affairs Dr. Paul Unger to the Toledo Blade. The photographs - two of student Timothy Broud and two of his partner, student Rebekah Merritt - showed frontal nudity. Merritt was happy about the college's reversal. "If you're going to do something so brash as to censor something, you should explain yourself the right way," she said. She and Broud had produced the photographs as part of final projects for a photography class. "I thought it represented a side that people don't see, the closeness that can happen outside the norm of a heterosexual relationship," said Broud of his work. "I didn't see anything wrong with them." Before the college reversed itself and allowed the photographs to go back on display, Merritt and Broud had been approached by an attorney offering to help them fight the takedown if need be.
