The LA Times
The 18 counts filed Thursday follow an initial filing of disciplinary charges in August and provide more examples of how the bar contends that Spolin and his Westside firm used deceptive marketing and outright lies to convince desperate families to hire him.
One alleged violation concerned a 2023 news release on Spolin’s website announcing that Gov. Gavin Newsom had commuted the sentence of one of his clients. In fact, the man told The Times last year, he had pursued the commutation on his own, and Spolin did not do any work on it. At the time, Spolin’s firm was urging families to pay more than $9,000 to pursue a commutation, a route experts say has only a miniscule chance of success.
In another instance cited by the bar, an attorney working for Spolin told a Los Angeles man, Wesner Charles Jr., who was serving a sentence of 27 years to life for attempted carjacking and robbery, that a reform law could “get him out” in six to eight months.
Spolin charged the family $19,000 without informing them that Charles and others convicted of violent crimes did not meet the requirements for consideration. The L.A. County district attorney’s office had written “no fewer than nine letters” to Spolin advising him that such cases “would not be acted upon,” wrote Cindy Chan, a supervising attorney in the bar’s Office of Chief Trial Counsel.
Charles, who maintained his innocence, was later released with the help of a different attorney.
The rest of the new allegations relate to three other incarcerated men from L.A. whose families paid $11,500 to $21,700 for fruitless legal services.
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