State high court: Student who lied about grades can practice law

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has decided that a former law student who lied about his grades may practice law in Wisconsin.

Wednesday’s decision stems from an appeal of a Board of Bar Examiners decision declining to admit Joshua Jarrett to practice law in Wisconsin.

Jarrett was a former law student at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He started law school in 2011 after working as a police officer in Georgia for a year.

However, in 2012, Jarrett lied about his grades when applying for summer employment at the New York City Law Department. His unofficial transcript showed four inflated grades and a 2.75 grade-point average. His actual GPA was a 2.72. He also later emailed the city an attached transcript showing he had a 3.0 GPA.

Jarrett, as a result, was put on academic probation for two years and required to read an article about attorney conduct and discuss it with a law school dean.

When Jarrett applied for admission to the Wisconsin bar in 2013, as he prepared to graduate, he did disclose that he had lied about his grades to a prospective employer. At the same time, he failed to report several traffic citations he had received.

In 2015, the board used the misrepresentations he had made concerning both his grades and the unreported traffic citations as the main reasons for rejecting his application for admission. Jarrett responded by asking the board to review the decision. His appeal was denied, so he asked the state Supreme Court to step in.

In an unusual turn, the justices, in 4-3 decision on Wednesday, instructed the BBE to admit Jarrett with conditions. The dissenting votes came from Chief Justice Pat Roggensack and Justices Michael Gableman and Annette Ziegler.

As a result of Wednesday’s decision, Jarrett’s legal practice will be monitored for two years by a Wisconsin-licensed attorney appointed by the Office of Lawyer Regulation. That attorney, who must work somewhere near Jarrett, will submit reports every quarter to the OLR.

The majority of the court justices found that the BBE’s decision was too harsh, given the circumstances.

“While not excusing his actions, we are mindful that Mr. Jarrett has faced difficult family circumstances that imposed considerable pressure on him, both financial and otherwise,” according to the per curiam opinion. “His goal of becoming a lawyer has now been delayed several years, and his prospect of ever obtaining bar admission has been uncertain.”

The majority also noted that Jarrett, who lives in Maryland and has a non-legal job in Washington, D.C., has since completed unpaid legal internships, done volunteer legal work and earned the esteem of both employers and professors.

Justice Rebecca Bradley appeared to cast the deciding vote, siding with Justices Shirley Abrahamson, Ann Walsh Bradley and David Prosser, who wrote a concurring opinion in which Rebecca Bradley and Ann Walsh Bradley joined.

“This court expects Mr. Jarrett to vindicate the high hopes we have in him,” Prosser wrote. “It will surely remember if he does not. Courts cannot succeed for long if they are unable to leaven justice with mercy. By fashioning a unique form of conditional admission, we practice that principle in the present case.”

Roggensack, in her dissent, wrote that she was not persuaded that Jarrett had the moral character and fitness for admission to practice law in Wisconsin.

“Coupled with the Board’s finding that Mr. Jarrett was not credible at the evidentiary hearing before the Board and when claiming he forgot to disclose three fairly recent separate speeding violations from Georgia, Kentucky, and Wisconsin, I conclude that there are simply too many incidents in which Mr. Jarrett considered the truth optional when it was not to his advantage,” she wrote. Follow @erikastrebel