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People v. Dillings9/19/1994
Original Proceeding in Discipline
This attorney discipline case comes to us on a stipulation, agreement, and conditional admission of misconduct entered into between the respondent and the assistant disciplinary counsel. In the stipulation, the parties agreed to the imposition of a public censure. An inquiry panel of the Supreme Court Grievance Committee approved the stipulation and recommended that the respondent receive a public censure for his misconduct. We accept the stipulation, and publicly censure the respondent and assess costs against him.
I
We derive the relevant facts from the stipulation of the parties. The respondent was the plaintiff in a civil action, filed in Denver District Court, in which he asserted claims for personal injuries resulting from five separate automobile accidents involving five separate defendant drivers. The accidents allegedly took place between January of 1988 and October of 1990. The respondent's complaint alleged extraordinary physical, psychological, and economic injuries, damages, and losses. Each defendant denied the applicable material allegations of the complaint.
During the course of discovery, the respondent made numerous material statements regarding the purported cause of the injuries he allegedly had suffered from the above-mentioned automobile accidents. In his answers to interrogatories submitted to him by several of the defendants, the respondent claimed that he had suffered injuries to various specified parts of his body as a result of the accidents and that he had experienced no prior injuries or illnesses affecting those parts of his body. He also stated in responses to interrogatories that he had seen no health care professionals for other than routine physical examinations during the last ten years and denied that any records of treatment for any reason existed for that time period. The respondent additionally represented that he had never been in any other accidents of any kind prior or subsequent to the automobile accidents that were the subjects of his complaint. At his deposition, the respondent testified consistently with the answers he had given to the written interrogatories.
The respondent also objected to a motion by one of the defendants to compel production of copies of his medical records while on military duty and a list of all the health care providers he had seen between 1981 and 1987. The respondent asserted that he had no medical illnesses or injuries that had required non-routine care while in the military, and that he had not seen any physician, had not been hospitalized, and had not received any prescriptions from 1981 to 1987.
Three of the five defendants settled their claims with the respondent prior to trial. The trial for the remaining two defendants was scheduled to begin on January 27, 1992. However, shortly before trial, the trial court ordered the production of the respondent's military medical records. The information contained in the 180 pages comprising those records contradicted the respondent's previous statements concerning his health care in the ten years preceding the first accident alleged in his complaint, and revealed that the respondent had received treatment for several conditions that he claimed had never existed prior to the first-alleged automobile accident. Additional medical records submitted by the respondent revealed that he had been in two other automobile accidents, in 1981 and 1988, and had a slip and fall accident in 1981, contrary to his answers to questions posed in interrogatories and in his deposition.
The respondent's counsel sought to withdraw from representing the respondent on the ground that the respondent h
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