Complaint dismissed

A good decision by the N.C. State Bar has cleared a lawyer who simply tried to do the right thing.

Staples Hughes of Raleigh faced disciplinary action, up to possible disbarment, because he'd revealed a confidence that could help a convicted man prove his innocence. Now the State Bar, the government agency that regulates lawyers, has dismissed an ethics complaint filed against Hughes.

It was the right move. Hughes found himself in a difficult position between an attorney's duty to his client and a citizen's commitment to justice. He chose justice. In doing so, who could really say he harmed the former client, a murderer who killed himself in prison in 2002?

In 2004, Hughes revealed that Jerry Cashwell had told him, two decades ago, that he had been the sole killer in a double homicide in Cumberland County. Hughes was then a young public defender, representing Cashwell. Another defendant in the case, Lee Wayne Hunt, is still serving two life sentences for the murders. Hughes told a lawyer for Hunt what Cashwell had said, and later testified about it, buttressing Hunt's appeal for a new trial. (The state Supreme Court recently rejected Hunt's appeal.)

In coming forward, Hughes stepped into a swampy area of legal ethics. A key component of our justice system is the confidentiality of attorney-client communications, and here a lawyer was revealing his late client's guilt.

In dismissing the ethics complaint, the State Bar must have looked closely at a celebrated North Carolina case. In 2003, the state Supreme Court allowed a defense attorney to disclose what a dead client had told him (the information concerned the poisoning death of Eric Miller in Chapel Hill). Although an attorney's duties to a deceased client continue, the court ruled, the expectation of permanent confidentiality cannot be absolute. Sometimes, justice has a greater claim.

Clearly, Staples Hughes found himself facing just such a claim, and the State Bar was right to exonerate him.