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Following a day-long disciplinary hearing in Rockbridge County Circuit Court last Wednesday, a three-judge panel ruled that Jared Jenkins, town attorney for Goshen and former city attorney for Lexington, violated two of the Virginia State Bar’s rules of conduct and suspended his license to practice law in the commonwealth of Virginia for nine months.
Jenkins was charged with violations of multiple codes of conduct, including rule 8.2 (making false allegations against the court) in relation to comments he made about Rockbridge County Circuit Court Judge Christopher Russell following a ruling by the judge in a case involving a land trust, as well as rule 3.4d (failure to follow a court ruling) for failing to pay fines resulting from those rulings and comments in a timely manner. He also faced multiple rule violations for misconduct in relation to money he took from the account of the Mann Legal Group in November of 2022, which he was ruled to not be in violation of.
“Everyone who walks into a courtroom knows there’s going to be a winner and there’s going to be a loser … but you don’t have the right to insult the judge on the way out the door to the clerk’s office to file an appeal,” Paulo Franco, the attorney representing the Virginia State Bar, argued in his opening statements.
Jenkins, in his opening statements, reiterated the facts of the Dudley Land Trust case, which was the case that led to the rulings and comments about Judge Russell. He argued that Russell did not have jurisdiction to order the sale of land from the Dudley Land Trust to an outside party without first appointing a trustee, something that Russell had previously ruled was necessary to conduct the sale.
“No one has said that what Judge Russell did was right,” Jenkins said. “No one has pointed to cases that support that. It’s not ‘Jared, you’re wrong on the law.’ It’s ‘Jared, you’re wrong for what you said.’”
Origins In Land Trust Dispute
Jenkins’ comments about Russell stemmed from a case involving the Dudley Land Trust.
Jenkins served as the attorney for the beneficiaries of said trust and in January of 2022, filed a motion to intervene in Rockbridge County Circuit Court to stop the sale of land out of the trust by Joanne Dudley Moore to Christopher Irvine without a trustee being appointed.
The previous trustee, Otho Jackson Dudley, died in 2013 and no successor has been appointed. Moore filed a petition in 2019 to be named a successor trustee in order to enact the sale of land from the trust to Irvine, with other beneficiaries filing a counterclaim. The case was heard before Russell on Nov. 12, 2020, before being dismissed on Feb. 9, 2021.
On Dec. 17, 2021, a complaint was filed with the court by Wayne Heslep on behalf of Irvine, asking that a special commissioner be appointed to enact the sale Moore had agreed to. On Dec. 22, Russell ordered a special commissioner appointed and ordered that the trust pay Irvine’s attorney’s fees. On Dec. 27, a deed was filed by Bruce Patterson, who had been appointed as a special commissioner by Russell, awarding the land in question to Irvine. Otho Jackson Dudley was listed as the trustee on the deed.
Jenkins, on behalf of the beneficiaries of the trust, filed the motion to intervene on Jan. 18. In the motion, Jenkins argued that “the Parties and the Court have ignored multiple procedural safeguards designed to insure the property of a Trust is not stolen from that Trust,” and that his clients “see an explanation of the current posture of this case, an explanation of the authority supporting the actions taken and reconsideration of those actions,” adding that “if these actions are allowed to stand, the citizens of Rockbridge County will rightly question the rule of law.”
In a hearing on the motion to intervene on June 2, 2022, Jenkins argued in court that a trustee was necessary and that Heslep and his partner Brian Kearney were arguing that appointing a trustee was “a lot of trouble … [and] it would be inconvenient to Mr. Irvine. Well, that’s the law unfortunately. The law is a trustee needs to be appointed to sell this property under all relevant statute and case law … So if we’re going to ignore this statute on behalf of Chris Irvine, what other statutes are we going to ignore?”
After Jenkins posed that question, Russell said he took offense at the insinuation and issued sanctions against Jenkins for his comments and ordered him to pay attorney’s fees for Heslep and his partner Brian Kearney.
When Jenkins did not pay the fees as ordered, he was ordered to appear in court to show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court. In his response to the rule to show cause, which was filed on Sept. 29, 2022, Jenkins reiterated his arguments that the sale of the land from the Dudley Land Trust to Irvine was void due to the fact that the trust does not currently have a trustee, and the fact that the court had previously ruled that Moore “did not have the power to convey the property because she was not a trustee and that a sale of the property could only take place after a trustee was appointed.”
“The Court cannot create subject matter jurisdiction over the property merely by appointing a special commissioner to sign a deed of conveyance, especially when that deed includes the long-dead former trustee as a party,” he argued.
Jenkins concluded his response by adding, “If the Court will go to these lengths for these purposes, it is reasonable to ask to what other lengths and for what other purposes the Court has wrongfully attempted or will wrongfully attempt to use its self-assumed power, particularly regarding the Court’s civil docket.”
At the hearing on Oct. 6, 2022, Russell held Jenkins in contempt of court and added an additional fine of $200 per day for each day that the fees weren’t paid, as well as a 60day jail sentence beginning Nov. 10, 2022, unless the fines were paid before that.
“It makes no difference to the bar whether the judge was right or wrong. It’s what you said and who you said it to.”
- Judge Frank Yeatts
He also addressed Jenkins’ comments in his response to the show cause summons, referring to them as “a diatribe against the court, [which makes] allegations and insinuations that the Court is corrupt and has acted unlawfully,” and scheduled a hearing on his privilege to appear as the attorney of record in Rockbridge County Circuit Court. When Jenkins attempted to reiterate his arguments at the hearing on his privileges, held on Oct. 20, 2022, Russell cut him off and revoked his privileges.
The day before the hearing on his privileges, Jenkins sent an email to members of the Virginia State Bar, reiterating his arguments regarding the land trust and Russell’s rulings on the case. In the email, he called Russell a “tyrant” – noting that it was not an allegation he made lightly – for threatening him with jail time for questioning his decisions in the case.
Jenkins’ former partner, Larry Mann of the Mann Legal Group in Lexington, testified at the hearing last week that Jenkins had brought him a draft of the response to the show cause filed in September 2022 for review. Mann said that he’d given Jenkins “two pages of notes” on edits to make to the response, including that Jenkins “avoid allegations and stick to the facts,” but that Jenkins had taken none of his suggestions before filing the response with the court.
At several points throughout the hearing, the judges posed questions directly to Jenkins relating to his comments about Russell.
Judge Frank Yeatts, a judge in the 24th Judicial Circuit, asked Jenkins why, if he thought that Russell had behaved unethically he brought the case to the state bar and not to the Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission, which investigates charges of judicial misconduct against judges. Jenkins replied that he sent the email to the members of the bar in hopes of making them aware of the situation and potentially getting support from them in the case.
“You’re tying your conduct to whether the judge was right or wrong,” Yeatts noted. “It makes no difference to the bar whether the judge was right or wrong. It’s what you said and who you said it to.”
Judge Bruce Albertson, who serves in the 26th Circuit, asked Jenkins if he was arguing that he was “so right that you were justified in saying what you said?”
“Essentially, yes,” was Jenkins’ reply.
Albertson also asked if Jenkins was asking for the panel to make a ruling on whether Russell had jurisdiction to effect the sale in the land trust case and Jenkins clarified that he was not.
“I’m asking it to be taken into account when determining if my statements to the judge were fair,” he said.
A Controversial Check The majority of the rules Jenkins was charged with violating centered around a $15,000 check that he’d written and cashed from the Mann Legal Group on Nov. 3, 2022.
Following the fines and sanctions imposed by Russell in the land trust case, Jenkins approached Mann about using some of the firm’s funds to pay the fees, which he estimated was around $6,800. Mann initially agreed to the amount, but later withdrew his approval of using the firm’s money to pay the fines. When asked why during his testimony, Mann said that he felt that it was Jenkins’ responsibility to pay the fines himself since his behavior had led to them.
Mann testified that it wasn’t unusual for either Jenkins or himself to occasionally draw additional money from the firm’s account for personal reasons beyond their regular salaries. The system they used was that whichever of them wanted the money would first discuss it with the other partner and if both agreed to the draw, they would consult with Julie Crowder, the office manager, to see if there was enough money in the account for the draw and to have enough left over to cover any upcoming expenses. Mann said that he preferred to keep at least $10,000 in the account “as a cushion.”
Neither partner had denied the other a request for a draw prior to Jenkins’ request to use funds to pay the court fines.
Mann and Crowder each testified about how Jenkins had been removed as a signatory on the Mann Legal Group account prior to his writing the check that November, but that they did not inform Jenkins that the privilege had been revoked.
When Jenkins asked Mann during his cross-examination why he hadn’t been informed of being removed as a signatory on the account, Mann said that there was “no compelling reason for me to tell you because it wouldn’t have impacted how you were doing your job.”
Crowder was the person who signed the firm’s checks, though Mann and Jenkins were both authorized to do so when the signatory agreement with Truist Bank was originally signed in September 2020.
Jenkins argued that he took the money, not to pay his fines, but because the legal group was dissolving and that the money he took was his.
He questioned Mann about the operating agreement they’d both signed for the legal group in December 2019. The operating agreement does not include a policy for draws like the one Jenkins and Mann utilized, but did include provisions for negotiations and mediation in the event of a disagreement on matters between partners within the firm, as well as require the creation of capital accounts for each partner, which was not done.
Both Mann and Crowder testified about concerns over Jenkins’ behavior following the rulings from Judge Russell being part of the reason for Jenkins being removed as signatory from the Truist account. Crowder also testified that she had moved the checks from their regular place by the printer to a locked cabinet in her office where Jenkins had retrieved them.
“We were afraid that you were in so much trouble and getting so desperate that you would do something like this,” Mann said to Jenkins during his cross-examination.
Crowder also testified that the check Jenkins had written to himself and cashed was taken out of sequence and that there were “five to 10 checks ahead of it,” but couldn’t testify to when those checks were written in relation to Jenkins’ check.
In response to a question from one of the judges, Jenkins said that the fines were paid prior to Nov. 10, 2022 from the account of his private practice.
The three-judge panel ultimately ruled that the bar’s evidence did not meet the burden of proof that Jenkins’ behavior in regards to the check constituted a violation of the codes of conduct with which he was charged. -The panel suspended Jenkins license to practice law for nine months, beginning last Wednesday. Jenkins did not respond to requests for comment.
Goshen Vice Mayor Steve Bickley told The News-Gazette on Monday that he had not spoken with the other members of Council about the ruling, but it would be discussed at Town Council’s next regular meeting on Feb. 6. Speaking for himself and not on behalf of the Council, Bickley said that the ruling didn’t change his opinion of Jenkins and that he still had “full faith and confidence” in him and would like to see him continue to work with the town, even if just in an advisory capacity.
“I appreciate what Jared has done for us and for the town, and I will pay that appreciation back however I can,” he said. “I hope the path forward will be good for him and for the town.”
