No Spice Lawyer for Ohio

The Ohio Supreme Court has permanently barred an applicant from sitting for the Bar examination.

the Board of Commissioners on Character and Fitness, having held a hearing at which Libretti testified and having considered Libretti’s supplemental responses to his character and fitness questionnaire, recommends that Libretti’s registration application be disapproved and that he be  practice of law in Ohio. In support of that recommendation, the board cites Libretti’s 1992 federal conviction under the “kingpin” statute for his role in organizing, managing, or supervising a criminal drug enterprise, his involvement in the sale of “spice”—a mix of shredded plant material and man-made chemicals that has been touted as a legal alternative to marijuana—following his release from prison, and his failure to fully disclose certain aspects of his postrelease conduct as required by the terms of his supervised release and by the application to register as a candidate for admission to the practice of law in Ohio.

Libretti was convicted in 1992 and on supervised release after serving 16 years.

His next stop

Shortly after his release from prison and while he was on supervised release in Wyoming, Libretti began engaging in morally (if not legally) questionable conduct involving spice, the man-made marijuana alternative. At first, he used his credit card to finance the spice business of his roommate—a convicted drug dealer whom he had met in a halfway house after his release from prison—and ran the proceeds of that business through his bank account to avoid having them garnished to satisfy his roommate’s child-support obligations. Libretti later stepped in to manage the business on a temporary basis when his roommate went to prison for a probation violation. But shortly after his roommate’s release, authorities searched the home that the two men shared and seized quantities of spice, chemicals to manufacture spice, and $7,200 in cash. The following month, his roommate committed suicide, and Libretti continued his business—selling spice and its components to buyers in Wyoming even after he moved to Ohio in August 2010 to attend law school. He also recruited a known methamphetamine dealer to assist him in the endeavor.

He was arrested on drug charges in 2011 and acquitted but

The board was…struck by what it described as Libretti’s “amoral viewpoint” regarding his criminal activities and his subsequent spice operation. One of his admissions-committee interviewers testified that while Libretti described his conduct as stupid and foolish and recognized the negative impact it had had on his own life and the lives of his family members, he expressed no real concern about the harm that his conduct had visited upon the countless others who were affected by his past criminal activities or his sale of spice.

He also was not truthful in his admission application.

 Rather than fully disclosing the mistakes that he has made since his release from prison, Libretti has intentionally concealed and misrepresented them during every step of the admissions process.

A dissent agrees with the result but would not forever bar a future application. (Mike Frisch)