Inadmissible

Tough Love – Cardiologists advise men nearing 70 to avoid shoveling snow, but the U.S. Bureau of Prisons isn’t listening. That’s why former state Senator John Lynch has a hernia, according to his lawyer, Jack Arseneault.

Lynch also has precancerous basal cells on his face, scalp and neck and he tore a ligament climbing down from an upper bunk at the federal prison in Loretto, Pa., where he is serving a 39-month prison sentence for mail fraud and tax evasion.

Arseneault wrote to U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler on Aug. 21 that the prison gave Lynch a truss for his surgery but it hasn’t prescribed operations for any of his ailments. Once Lynch gets to a Residential Re-Entry Center (RRC)near the end of his sentence he plans to pay for his own surgery.

When will that be? Prison authorities plan to transfer Lynch to a halfway house four or five months before his November 2009 scheduled release date. Last Monday, Chesler recommended a transfer six months before release.

Arseneault wanted Chesler to recommend the full year permitted by federal law so Lynch could start a new career, and he wants his client to be closer than Loretto, an 11-hour roundtrip drive from the Lynch family home in New Brunswick.

“For the past 43 years, Mr. Lynch made a living as an attorney, legislator and business government consultant,” Arseneault said. But he has been disbarred and has to start a new career. “The sooner he is transferred to an RRC in New Jersey the sooner he will be able to start that difficult process,” Arseneault said.

Debt Advice No Vice – Bankruptcy lawyers are debt-relief agencies under a 2005 revision to the Bankruptcy Code, but that doesn’t stop them from advising clients to take on debt, a federal appeals court in St. Louis said Thursday in a novel ruling.

The court held that a provision barring debt-relief agencies from telling their clients to incur more debt in contemplation of bankruptcy violates the First Amendment as applied to attorneys.

“Section 526(a)(4), as written, prevents attorneys from fulfilling their duty to clients to give them appropriate and beneficial advice not otherwise prohibited by the Bankruptcy Code or other applicable law,” the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel said in Milavetz Gallop & Milavetz v. U.S., noting it might be in a client’s interest to buy a reliable car or refinance a home mortgage before filing for bankruptcy.

Mark Goldman, a consumer bankruptcy lawyer with offices in East Orange and Jersey City, agrees, saying “I don’t see how you can be restricted from giving good legal advice to someone.”

Noting that bankruptcy practice involves economics and sometimes “a bit of social work,” Goldman says advice to clients could cover buying a car or health insurance and that those kinds of debts could protect a Chapter 7 filer from being forced by a trustee to convert to Chapter 13.