Clinton-style defence in sex case

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Snipt from The Times
From Chris Ayres in Los Angeles

A PUBLIC defence lawyer found by prison guards in a compromising position with her murderer client may go unpunished because of a Clinton-style debate over the term “sexual relations”. Theresa Olson was accused of having sex with Sebastian Burns, recently convicted of bludgeoning to death a friend’s parents and sister in August 2002. At the time of the encounter Ms Olson was 43 and married; her client was 26. After being removed from the case, Ms Olson resigned from her firm, The Defender Association, and Washington State hired a new legal team.

The murder case ended this year, a decade after the crime, when Mr Burns and his codefendant, Atif Rafay, were teenagers. It was found that the two, Canadian citizens, used baseball bats to kill Tariq and Sultana Rafay, both 56, and their autistic daughter, Basma, 20. At the time, Rafay was a student at Cornell, an Ivy League university. The pair allegedly wanted the family’s life insurance money. Ms Olson says she did not break ethics rules, only that she engaged in “inappropriate physical contact”. “I was giving him a hug and it got a little out of hand,” she said.

Although Ms Olson initially admitted the sexual contact with her client in an agreement last year with the Washington State Bar Association, that agreement was overturned by the Supreme Court and cannot be used as evidence. Ms Olson now denies it. Her case is likely to be helped by the lack of any formal definition of “sexual relations”, even though an ethics rule in 2000 prohibits lawyers from having such contact with clients. Her case against the Bar starts on Monday. “Now the Bar has to prove it,” Ms Olson’s lawyer said, “and we’re going to see if they can.” In a brief on the case, Joanne Abelson, a Bar lawyer, said the Olson case had given “a well-publicised black eye” to the integrity of the legal profession. “Olson may argue that she and Burns did not have sexual intercourse and hence they did not have ‘sexual relations’, ” she wrote, going on to accuse Ms Olson of having a romantic affair with her client for several months before the incident. “The incident did not occur out of the blue, as Olson may suggest,” Ms Abelson wrote.

Although the Bar is pushing for a one-year suspension, Ms Olson’s lawyer is recommending a lesser punishment. The decision will be made by the Washington Supreme Court. The case of Burns and Rafay was controversial for other reasons. The pair fled to Canada after their crime, where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police planted bugs in an effort to gain taped confessions, a tactic that would have been illegal in the US.Canadian prosecutors refused to extradite the pair until 2001, when US public prosecutors agreed that they would not be sent to death row.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1256457,00.html