Legal Malpractice

Soon after she and other jurors found Napoleon Winchell Cotton guilty of a $75,000 robbery at the Long Beach Naval Station, Winnie Jackson began feeling guilty herself. Jackson decided she'd made a mistake, that Cotton was not the man who committed the stickup inside a federal credit union office at the station. And she decided to try to reverse the conviction that she and 11 other jurors had voted in Long Beach Superior Court. "I'm the victim in this," she declared. It is not unusual for jurors to have second thoughts after ruling on a hard-fought criminal case.

An attorney for former Simi Valley High basketball Coach Bob Hawking has filed suit against attorneys Jerry Roth and Robert Young and former UCLA assistant coach Jack Hirsch for allegedly leaking privileged information. The suit, filed Tuesday in L.A Superior Court for unspecified damages, alleges that Roth, Young and Hirsch gave confidential information to The Times and the authors of the book "Raw Recruits."

An attorney for the State Bar of California today will seek the disbarment of a Torrance lawyer who is accused of slipping $100 bills to a former hearing officer for the state Department of Motor Vehicles to influence the officer's decisions. The State Bar's case against attorney Barry G. Sands, 44, was presented last month during a hearing in which the former DMV officer, Michael R. Tarrish, testified that Sands on four occasions gave him $100 bills rolled up in matchbooks.

A lawyer in Santa Ana faces charges that he embezzled more than $100,000 in workers' compensation checks meant for his clients, authorities said Thursday. Carlos Mario Hernandez, 46, is expected to be arraigned today on charges that he forged clients' signatures on the payments and then held onto the money, Deputy Dist. Atty. Patti Nichols said. Hernandez mishandled funds belonging to five clients beginning in December, 1993, Nichols said.

A Los Angeles chiropractor pleaded guilty Tuesday to 18 counts of conspiracy, grand theft and forgery resulting from an alleged scheme to bilk the Southern California Rapid Transit District out of thousands of dollars through phony injury claims filed in connection with bus accidents. In a related development, The Times has learned that the district attorney's office has called witnesses before the Los Angeles County Grand Jury as part of its ongoing investigation of RTD insurance fraud.

A Los Angeles lawyer, Raul Palomo Jr., 39, dismissed a client's case without permission and lied about it, forged another client's signature on a settlement proposal, and misappropriated $11,250. A Santa Ana lawyer, Donald R. Powell, 49, collected several fees, including what the California State Bar termed an "unconscionable" $2,000 for a trademark matter, but never did the work.

Graham A. Ritchie, the city attorney in the City of Industry and the former city attorney in Hawaiian Gardens, has agreed to pay $300,000 in fines to settle a civil lawsuit alleging that he had a conflict of interest in the issuance of bonds in both cities.

An Orange County adoption attorney accused of being a go-between in an illegal international baby-bartering scheme was released from federal custody Friday pending her arraignment in two weeks. Janice June Doezie, 49, of Villa Park was named in a nine-count federal indictment accusing her of helping recruit pregnant Hungarian women in a scheme to sell their babies to well-to-do California couples.

A man awaiting trial in Orange County for allegedly posing as an attorney and taking thousands of dollars from unsuspecting clients appeared twice as a legal counsel in Los Angeles Municipal Court this summer while free on bail, court records show. Interviews and records show that the accused impostor, known most recently as Christopher Kennedy, made the two appearances on behalf of an acquaintence. The first appearance came only 10 days after his release from Orange County jail on June 4.

A Westminster attorney and two office employees were convicted Thursday on conspiracy and other charges in what authorities have described as one of the state's largest auto insurance fraud schemes. The scam involved "victims" seeking payouts for injuries they never suffered in auto accidents that never happened.