United States v. Lynn Boyd Stites

Lynn Boyd Stites appeals his conviction of violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1962 (c) (RICO) and of twelve violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1341 (mail fraud). His principal issues on appeal are challenges to the disqualification of two lawyers he wanted to represent him. Holding that the district court properly disqualified the lawyers, we affirm his conviction. On one aspect of his sentencing, we remand for resentencing.

FACTS

From the perspective of the government, it was established at trial that Stites had been the mastermind of a massive set of breaches of professional responsibility and of the criminal law, the more heinous because Stites was a lawyer and at least twelve other lawyers were his principal confederates in carrying out the fraud. The mentality that sees law as a business was here taken to a reduetio ad absurdum — litigation was unconscionably churned to make money for the lawyers. The essence of Stites’s scheme, repeated over and over again, was for Stites to control both sides of suits in which insurance companies were paying for counsel, and to assure that the plaintiffs’ lawyers would not settle until the insurance companies would no longer pay the costs of defendants’…