Is it dangerous to be a lawyer?
Recent killings are raising security concerns within legal community
The tire iron that landed on the boardroom floor of Neha Chugh’s law office in Cornwall got her thinking about safety. But she got serious this past week after the murder of a Toronto legal receptionist at her downtown workplace.
Looking back on her 10 years of practice, Chugh can recall being threatened by clients and witnesses, “and brushing it off, trying to appear tough.” Not anymore.
Her firm recently added a security monitoring system at the entrance of the two-storey red brick office, something other Toronto criminal law firms also have in place. “While we love our work and respect our clients, we have to set boundaries and especially protect our staff and ourselves,” the criminal and family law lawyer explained.
The stabbing death of Julia Ferguson, 29, came less than a year after the killing of Toronto lawyer Scott Rosen, 52, who was run over in a Midtown underground parking lot last December.
After hearing legal arguments this week, a judge is now deciding whether the woman charged with his first-degree murder should be released on bail pending her trial. Anh Chiem, 62, had previously been embroiled in several nasty legal proceedings with Rosen, a commercial litigator.
Both killings rattled and raised safety concerns within Ontario’s legal community.
“An absolute tragedy that has rocked the criminal defence community to its core,” lawyer Alison Craig tweeted after Ferguson died while at work at Hicks Adams LLP office on King Street. Many others lawyers expressed similar sentiments.
And although examples of threats and acts of violence against lawyers are not new, some in the community believe their profession has become more dangerous.
Prominent defender John Struthers thinks this is particularly true for those who defend “the rights of the dispossessed and distressed” who might turn their “traumas” on counsel. Struthers is also president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association. The CLA represents about 1,800 lawyers across Ontario.
“Blaming others for your own issues seems to be a trend everywhere,” he wrote in an email, adding it is coinciding with an alarming increase in “extremism, racism, misogyny and bigotry” fuelled by some right-wing media outlets and the “wild west of the internet.”
“If you lose a case, it is the lawyer’s fault and ineffective assistance of counsel claims have skyrocketed,” Struthers said, adding he knows lawyers who carry concealed firearm permits.
In 2019, a judge sent a Toronto man to prison for three years after finding him guilty of planning to kidnap and extort the lawyers involved in a condo deal where he came out the loser.
“I view it as a matter of public policy that lawyers who represent members of the public be protected against threats of violence by disgruntled former clients or parties against whom they are acting,” Superior Court Justice Suhail Akhtar wrote in his sentencing decision, adding the accused’s actions “struck at the heart of the legal system.”
Another apparent example of lawyer disgruntlement happened last month in London, Ont., when a man admitted spray painting the front of a building in large red letters “this law office conspires against clients,” the London Free Press reported. (Except he targeted the wrong building, which was next door.)
The same man was also charged with spray painting the names of a crown attorney and defence lawyer on a wall outside the London courthouse with the words “sexual assault dream team.”
The newspaper interviewed a man now charged with mischief who took responsibility and said he was motivated by grievances against police and the criminal justice system.
Toronto defence lawyer Randall Barrs still has no idea five years later why a career criminal ambushed him outside his then Annex-area law office and shot him twice in the leg. The man was sentenced to 12 years
in prison following a plea deal Barrs considered pathetic.
Yet despite what happened to him on that Sept. 20, 2016, afternoon, Barrs doesn’t feel defence lawyers are under any greater threat than, say, judges or prosecutors.
“I would think rationally, defence counsel, we have pretty good relationships with our clients and we’re what stands between them and the system, where there’s a lot of money and a lot of power,” he said in an interview this past week.
Practising law since 1976, Barrs said he’s never been threatened nor had problems with clients, though sometimes “we don’t agree or they want another opinion,” or they part company for a variety of reasons.
“That’s the way things go sometimes.”
Barrs thinks divorce attorneys are likely to be the most endangered legal practitioners. “Everybody hates their (own) lawyer and the other person’s lawyer,” he said, half-joking.
Besides, today’s courthouse security protocols — they include airport-like screening at entrances, surveillance cameras and uniform staff on patrol — were put in place years ago after two Toronto lawyers were gunned down inside downtown courthouses.
In 1979, Frederick Gans, a 40year-old family lawyer, was shot to death by a former client’s husband during divorce proceedings while lawyer Oscar Fonseca, 51, was killed in 1982 in an Osgoode Hall courtroom after a gunman opened fire during a civil dispute involving the elections to the board of a Sikh temple.
When someone shattered the front window of her Cornwall law firm’s building, Chugh told police she had no idea who might have done it — the list could be endless.
Accused persons with mental health issues, opposing parties, victims, complainants, witnesses who were cross-examined, or “it could have also have been a random act of violence,” she said. No one was arrested.
Days before Christmas last year, Scott Rosen, 52, left his law office on Eglinton Avenue East and walked to his car parked in the underground lot. There, he was intentionally hit by the driver of a white U-Haul pickup truck who fled the scene. He died almost instantly.
It wasn’t the first time Rosen had been attacked.
In March 2018, after finishing work at a previous law office near Yonge and St. Clair, Rosen and was walking down a stairwell to get to his car when an assailant threw phosphoric acid on his head, said a source familiar with what happened. Rosen suspected Chiem, but she was never charged.
Meanwhile, the 33-year-old man charged with Ferguson’s second-degree murder was remanded in custody until later this month. Investigators have said little about the case except that the suspect was targeting the law firm.
Barrs, meanwhile, says he has made a full recovery after being shot at 66.
“You either go into hiding, live a life of fear — like we’re doing now with COVID — or you carry on.”
“Blaming others for your own issues seems to be a trend everywhere ... If you lose a case, it is the lawyer’s fault and ineffective assistance of counsel claims have skyrocketed.”
JOHN STRUTHERS PRESIDENT OF THE CRIMINAL LAWYERS’ ASSOCIATION