Disbarment Imposed For Child Pornography Conviction

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

The California Supreme Court says that lawyers convicted of child pornography charges will automatically be disbarred and prohibited from practicing law in the state.

The court said in an opinion issued Thursday that possessing or sharing sexual images of children necessarily constitutes an act of moral turpitude that makes an attorney unfit for the legal profession.

The ruling came in the case of Gary Douglass Grant, a former Army lawyer at the Los Alamitos Army Reserve Base in Orange County. Grant pleaded guilty to one count of possessing child pornography in 2009 after sheriff’s deputies found videos of underage girls mixed in with the adult pornography on his home computer.

A judge for the State Bar of California called for his disbarment, but an appeals board subsequently recommended that Grant only be suspended for two years.

The attorney admitted his “sex and love addiction and …addiction to Internet pornography.” He estimated that he had over 300,000 computer images of adult pornography on his computer  and “unknowingly received the images of children as well.”

The opinion is linked here. (Mike Frisch)