Cassandra’s Lament

According to the web page of the District of Columbia Bar, a disciplinary hearing is scheduled to begin this morning at 9:30 am in In re Brenda Wagner, DN. 20- BD – 059.

Further according to the web page, there is no such case. 

I searched the page by the attorney’s name (which notes a 2016 informal admonition and a link to a earlier numbered matter that takes you nowhere), the “pending cases” link, and for pending charges, petitions for reinstatement or consent disciplines over the past two years and came up with bupkis.

Indeed, according to the web page, there have been no petitions for reinstatement filed over that two year period.

Further, there is a hearing scheduled for June 14 that must be a petition for reinstatement filed in 2020, an inference drawn from the docket number and the (disclosed) fact that the attorney was permanently disbarred in New Jersey in 2011 and reciprocally disbarred in D.C.

No trace of the case was found.

Whether by design or structural error, this failure to provide information made public as a matter of policy of Court of Appeals is a serious lapse of self-regulation and must be fixed to provide a measure of much needed credibility to bar regulation. (Mike Frisch)