High court tosses charges against Madison attorney

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has dismissed a case against a Madison attorney charged with lying to a judge and opposing counsel.

Lawyer regulators charged Kyle Hanson with two counts of misconduct in 2014, alleging Hanson had  lied and made a misrepresentation to a judge while representing a couple in a property lawsuit filed in Green County Circuit Court. Hanson had failed to appear at a summary-judgement hearing and wrote to the judge in the case that he did not know about the hearing date but then admitted he did know about it.

The Office of Lawyer Regulation had asked the high court to privately reprimand Hanson. A referee appointed by the court, Michael Dubis, found that Hanson had lied and recommended that the court impose the discipline suggested by the OLR.

However, the justices, in a 4-3 decision handed down April 12, dismissed both charges of misconduct. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley dissented, joined by justices Shirley Abrahamson and Michael Gableman.

As to the first charge, the court’s majority found that although Dubis had found that Hanson’s statement in the letter he wrote to the court was in fact false, there was no finding that Hanson knew when he wrote the letter that it was false.

As for the second charge, the justices found that the letter was not a misrepresentation because OLR did not offer clear, satisfactory and convincing evidence that Hanson had actual knowledge that the statement was false or that he made the statement with reckless disregard of whether it was true.

Bradley wrote in her dissent that the second count of misconduct should not have been dismissed by the majority because Hanson’s failure to adequately review the file before writing to the court constituted reckless disregard of whether what he wrote was true.

She noted that Hanson said he had not noticed the hearing date on the front page of the motions documents that were mailed to him and that he had thought the date had not been approved by a judge.