LAWYER SUSPENDED; GOOD LOVE GONE BAD.
From: New York attorney Gary E. Rosenberg (personal injury and accident attorney and lawyer; serving Brooklyn Queens Bronx; Bronx accident lawyer)
Matter of Fawn D. Balliro
Second Dept.
Admitted to Bar: 2004
Discipline imposed: 6 month suspension
This story is one that shouldn't have happened.
Attorney Fawn Balliro was an Assistant District Attorney in Massachusetts. She fell in love with one Greg Knox, in Tennessee. Knox assaulted her in 2005, but she refused to press charges or cooperate with the police. She also told Knox not to talk to the cops.
Attorney Balliro gets handcuffed and arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction of justice (in my opinion, a bunch of crap). In any event, Knox gets arrested and charged with two counts of assault. Like many abused women, Balliro seems emotionally damaged and apparently lacks self-esteem, because she bails Knox out of jail the next morning and they reconcile.
Balliro goes back to Massachusetts. Knox visits her there and tells her he's on probation for drug charges. A conviction for assault in Tennessee would violate his probation and who would support his two young daughters, with his ex-wife unemployed?
Knox goes to trial in Nashville, Tennessee in April, 2005. Balliro decides to help Knox by concocting a story about falling and injuring herself. She will not press charges, but is subpoenaed to testify anyway. The Knoxville Assistant District Attorney handling the case tells Balliro that she can not drop the charges against Knox and that he did not believe her when she testified in court that she fell on a piece of furniture. Knox beats the charges.
In December 2005 a Tennessee District Attorney wrote to the Massachusetts District Attorney to advise that Balliro had lied under oath. Balliro is suspended from her job and told to get a lawyer.
In attorney disciplinary proceedings based on her lies to police and (under oath) at the trial in Tennessee, Massachusetts gave Balliro a six-month suspension of her law license. This despite Balliro arguing that she was in a precarious psychological state at the time.
New York matched the discipline handed out by Massachusetts, suspending Balliro for six months, and making her reinstatement to practice law in New York contingent on her first being reinstated in Massachusetts.
