Anju Kaur, a reporter in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s Capital News Service, has been named a finalist in the 2007 Investigative Reporters and Editors contest for her stories on the state’s abysmal record of disciplining attorneys.
Kaur becomes the seventh CNS reporter since 2000 to win a finalist spot in the student category of the annual IRE contest, which is open to students nationwide.
Kaur’s stories, more than a year in the making, showed that while the state’s Attorney Grievance Commission swiftly disbarred attorneys faced with the most grievous complaints, overall disciplinary actions were small and falling fast.
Her reporting also showed that many attorneys who repeatedly cheated, lied, stole or abandoned their clients did so for years without suffering any real consequence. Even a man who killed his client’s wife’s kitten in a microwave was still allowed to practice.
Kaur spent almost a year getting the attorney discipline data from the commission, which initially denied keeping such records and then admitted it had the data but claimed it was private and confidential.
After repeated conversations, Public Information Act requests and meetings, the commission finally agreed to release a copy of its file of sanctioned attorneys, which Kaur was able to turn into the heart of her stories.
She found that a profession that polices itself does very little disciplining of its own people. Kaur reported that the number of lawyers sanctioned by the state has fallen sharply in the last decade, with only 57 of the state’s 33,018 lawyers disbarred, suspended or reprimanded in the last fiscal year.
Her data also showed that less than a quarter of all complaints against lawyers were even investigated. Nearly half of the investigated complaints were “closed administratively” and only a third of the remaining cases received any kind of discipline.
After fighting Kaur for months over access to its records, the commission’s data custodian ultimately asked Kaur for a copy of her database and told her it would be used as the commission’s new internal database.
Kaur was a reporter last fall in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Capital News Service, the College’s student-staffed wire service with bureaus in Washington and Annapolis that feed a daily digest of news to clients around the state. She earned her master’s degree in journalism in December, and returned to edit SikhNN.com, a Sikh-oriented news site that she founded.
