[From the Dallas Morning News]We are all familiar with the expression “physician heal thyself”.
In view of Texas criminal defense attorney Catherine Shelton’s passel (as they say in them there parts) of legal troubles, Blogonaut is grasping for the counterpart phrase applicable to lawyers, but words escape us. And if you read to the end of this post you will understand why.
Shelton, who by the way is no kid at 59 years old, was already facing pending charges of leaving the scene of an accident and driving without insurance.
As the result of a November, 2007 brush with the law at the local mall, attorney Shelton can now add trying to walk out of Nordstrom at NorthPark Center with a $1,195 designer handbag, two shirts worth $326 and an $8 candle (even in Texas this is considered shoplifting), and trying to mislead police about her identity.
And did we mention that Ms. Shelton had traffic warrants out for her arrest with she was apprehended at Nordstrom?
Now, I suppose some die hard Dallas residents will say Shelton deserves what she gets for shopping at a Washington based department store instead of Neiman Marcus (headquartered in Dallas), but theft is still theft after all. But an equal number may say that at least she stole from Nordstrom and not a Texas chain. Then again, once the jury learns of her occupation (let alone her extensive rap sheet) all of that may be moot.
In the most recent incident, a store security camera captured Ms. Shelton concealing the items in her purse, according to a Dallas police report.
But Attorney Shelton’s checkered personal legal history runs deeper—much deeper.
Ms. Shelton's legal problems date back more than two decades and have been the focus of newspaper articles and national news programs.
In 1999, she was named a suspect – but never charged – in the shooting death of her office manager's husband. Ms. Shelton's husband, Clint Shelton, is serving a life sentence for murder in that case.
The office manager filed – but later dropped – a wrongful-death lawsuit against Ms. Shelton over the killing. It wasn't the first lawsuit in which she was accused of a homicide.
She faced another lawsuit in 1980 after the death of a former lover. She had sued the man, a Houston anesthesiologist, for divorce, arguing that they had a common-law marriage and that she was pregnant. On the day he was to face her in court, the doctor was found bludgeoned to death in his garage.
The doctor's estate sued Ms. Shelton and one of her former clients, alleging they conspired to murder the doctor, but the case was later dropped.
Both murders remain unsolved.
But the Texas barrister’s legal history also includes a series of convictions. For aggravated assault.
Ms. Shelton has been convicted of aggravated assault for shooting a former boyfriend. She was also convicted of assaulting a pregnant former friend.
Ms. Shelton, the subject of numerous complaints from her legal clients over the years, (amazingly) has been disbarred twice. But the board of disciplinary appeals reversed the rulings and reinstated her license each time – once because she was not properly notified of a disciplinary hearing and once because key paperwork vanished from the court file. (Imagine that!)
She held a license to practice law until this spring, when the State Bar of Texas suspended it. She was serving three years' probation for misrepresenting herself as an immigration lawyer when the bar revoked it because she failed to appear at two court hearings.
That suspension began May 15 and is to last until 2010.
As Blogonaut is fond of saying: Truth is stranger than fiction. And there is no truth stranger than this lawyer story out of Dallas, Texas.
3 comments:
Her past also includes setting fire to another boyfriend's apartment and shooting at one of her husbands. As to her age, she's been lying about that for years. Try 63 not 59.
has anyone wrote about her life
I am the guy identified usually as the anonymous boyfriend shot in the back from 1980 in Houston. But I was "Part Two" in Howard Swindle's Dallas Morning News series of 2002. I just wanted to let you know I just published a book about my adventures with Catherine in 1979-80. It is available at Amazon.com under the title "Luggage By Kroger." It already has garnered a 5-star review there.
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