Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, March 20

TODAY’S AGENDA:
March To Protest Anti-LGBT Violence: Washington, D.C. There has been a terrible spate of shootings of transgender and gay people in the nation’s capital over the past year. The most recent shooting was of a 31-year-old gay man at an IHOP in the Columbia Heights neighborhood on March 11. He suffered a bullet wound to the liver. In the same 24-hour period, another gay man and transgender woman were badly beaten in separate incidents. Both men are still in the hospital, while the woman was treated and released. A march has been called to protest the rise of anti-LGBT violence in the city. It will begin at 7:00 p.m. this evening outside the IHOP at 14th and Irving Streets, N.W., and will go east on Irving to Georgia Avenue, N.W., then to Morton Street, and then back to 14th St., where it will head south to R St, N.W. From there it will turn right on R St. and travel to 17th Street and end at the gay bar Cobalt. (I hope locals will understand all that.)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Florida Supreme Court: Gays Can’t Be Barred From State Bar: 1978. In 1976, Robert F. Eimers, a recent graduate of the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, had already been certified for admission to the Pennsylvania bar when he moved to Florida and took the exam for the Florida bar. He passed, but the Florida Board of Bar Examiners found that he might fail to meet the “good moral character” standard for admission because, in response to a question at a hearing, Eimers said that he was gay. The twelve member board deadlocked on whether to admit him and referred the matter to the Florida Supreme Court. On March 20, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-1 decision that a “substantial connection” between private behavior and the ability to carry out professional responsibilities would be required to bar Eimers from practicing law, and his homosexuality did not rise to that level. “Otherwise, the bar will be virtually unfettered in its power to censor the private morals of Florida bar members, regardless of any nexus between the behavior and the ability to responsibly perform as an attorney.”

Well, that’s our gay history for the day, and usually this is where such stories end. But as I was looking around the web for more information on Eimers, I discovered that while Florida’s Supreme Court was correct in ruling that a gay man cannot be prohibited from practicing law because of his “private morals,” that same that same court court would wind up disbarring Eimers nine years later because of his public morals. In 1982 Eimers, his law partner (who was not licensed to practice law) and husband-and-wife clients Daniel and Sally Phelps, were the subjects of an undercover sting involving money laundering and prostitution. In November 1982, they were all charged with two counts of money laundering, and the Phelps’s, in addition, were charged with three counts associated with the prostitution ring. After their arrest and indictment, they were all released on bail. The Phelps and Eimers were tried and convicted in June, 1983, but Eimers’s conviction was in absentia due to his becoming a fugitive in March. Eimers was sentenced to ten years and fined $100,000. In 1987, the Florida Supreme Court officially disbarred him (PDF: 176KB/6 pages) because of his felony conviction and allegations that he had misappropriated funds from three of his clients. I can’t find any record of his having served his sentence, but in 1993 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also ordered his disablement in that state as well. He apparently died in 1998 at the age of 51.

And that, as they say, is the rest of the story.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?