Embattled Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas brought out a big gun for his legal defense. But so far, that hasn't kept him from sounding off, often in ways that seem to run afoul of common sense.
His defense attorney, O'Melveny & Myers partner Kenneth Wainstein, said today that he and his client have established a strategy to best handle the legal implications of Arenas' off-court antics. "In any relationship you have to have mutual respect if it’s going to work, and we’ve had that from the beginning," Wainstein said. "We have a strong mutual understanding about how to move forward."
Wainstein, who said Arenas hired him “a week or two ago,” declined to comment on the facts of the Arenas case. But he certainly knows quite a bit about D.C.’s strict gun laws. As U.S. attorney from 2004 until 2006, he led the office responsible for enforcing them. And O’Melveny & Myers defended those same laws before the Supreme Court in the landmark case D.C. v. Heller – a case it ultimately lost.
Arenas is the subject of a grand jury probe into a Dec. 21 incident in which he placed several handguns outside teammate Javaris Crittenton’s locker. Simply by bringing handguns into the Verizon Center, Arenas may have violated the District’s strict handgun laws. The details of what actually occurred are still fuzzy, but several media outlets have reported that the incident stemmed from Arenas’ ribbing of Crittenton over a gambling debt.
Arenas has acknowledged bringing guns into the District, but he has said that he did so to keep them away from his children and only displayed them as a joke. He has been cooperating with law enforcement officials.
The early negative publicity garnered Arenas an indefinite unpaid suspension from the National Basketball Association after he continued to joke about the matter on his Twitter account and he pretended to shoot his teammates with finger guns before a Jan. 5 game.
Arenas has since appeared to change his tune. His Twitter account is no longer online, and he issued a statement on Jan. 6 apologizing for the incident and his antics. "I take full responsibility for my conduct," he said.
Washington defense lawyers split over whether a client running off half-cocked reflects badly on his lawyer.
“Despite Wainstein’s best efforts, he doesn’t have control of his client,” says Cozen O’Connor’s Bernie Grimm, who has represented numerous clients in gun-related matters in D.C. Superior Court. “Gilbert is on a mission that seems to start with running his mouth without stop.”
“At some point, a lawyer needs to ask himself whether he is the right person to handle a client’s case if the client isn’t listening to the advice he is giving him,” said a former Washington federal prosecutor who requested anonymity when speaking about a former colleague.
But Frederick Cooke Jr., who, as longtime counsel to former Mayor Marion Barry, knows something about publicity-hungry clients, says that’s not the case. “At the end of the day, Gilbert is a grown man who will make his own decisions,” Cooke said.
David Schertler, a name partner at Schertler & Onorato who worked with Wainstein in the U.S. Attorney’s Office agreed, saying, “You can’t hold a lawyer responsible for what a client does.” Moreover, he said, “It’s the wrong legal philosophy to abandon a client because you may not be able to exercise control over the client.”
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