LAWYERS EXONERATED IN SEPARATE HEROIN, FRAUD CASES

We tend to be somewhat hard on our colleagues who are caught engaging in outrageous misconduct, so we thought we would bring you the good news this week for two different lawyers in unrelated cases.

Our featured lawyer, Kevin Barron, Esquire, of Boston, was indicted and tried on charges that he tried to smuggle heroin to an inmate of Massachusetts state prison.

The 4.8 grams of heroin was concealed inside a legal brief being delivered to Barron’s client, but was discovered by a sharp-eyed prison staff member before the “smack” laden legal brief changed hands behind bars.

Mr. Barron’s claimed in his defense that he had no idea the package he was delivering contained “lady”, white girl, horse, black tar, brown sugar—or, you know—the “goods”—but we digress.

The jury accepted Barron’s defense that Gwen Foxworth, the mother of an inmate at the prison, inserted the heroin, all packaged up for distribution in small quantities, into three deep holes on the left side of a legal brief carried into the prison by Mr. Barron. The evidence of innocence included Mom’s fingerprints on the package containing multiple small packets of “H” that the Boston barrister was busted with on the way to an attorney-client visit at the lock-up, and Mom’s subsequent guilty plea.

Barron’s client, who was accused of accepting $1,000 in exchange for providing Mom with Barron’s address, also pleaded guilty to delivering a controlled substance to an inmate.

“I am innocent, and I would like to regain what was once a good reputation,’’ Barron said told the Boston Globe.

Our second Lucky -Luciano-of-the-Law concerns the founding partner of a Pittsburgh, Pa., law firm accused of conspiring with others to file fraudulent asbestos claims against CSX Transportation Corp. A West Virginia federal judge this week dismissed the accusation against attorney Robert Periece, who promptly proclaimed victory:

""They just made it up,” Pierce told WBOY-TV.

“I don’t feel vindicated because I never thought we were in any peril. I knew there was no fraud, there never was a fraud. I knew that from the beginning, and when anybody asked me I told them it was bogus. I knew all along it was something they’d made up, without any evidence or facts to support it.”"