It’s kind of hard to be an attorney when you’re also a criminal defendant. Kent Mawhinney, a co-defendant in the alleged murder of Connecticut woman Jennifer Dulos, faces a petition to suspend his law license.
“The respondent, due to his incarceration and any conditions that may be imposed upon his release from custody cannot attend to the legal needs of his clients and there exists a substantial threat of irreparable harm to his clients or to prospective clients,” wrote Chief Disciplinary Counsel Brian B. Staines in a letter obtained by Law&Crime. Connecticut records show it was filed Wednesday. A hearing is scheduled for January 28.
Staines is moving to have a trustee to inventory Mawhinney’s files “to secure his clients’ funds accounts, to take and review the office mail, and to take such actions as necessary to protect the interests of the respondent’s clients, as more fully set forth in the attached proposed order.”
Mawhinney is charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Police say his friend and client Fotis Dulos killed estranged wife Jennifer Dulos, is responsible for her disappearance on May 24, and that he went to great lengths to hide evidence. The victim’s body hasn’t been found, but investigators said that a lot of blood was left behind at her home. Officers said they were able to speak to Mawhinney, but they described his statements as “frequently vague or evasive, at times self-contradictory, and otherwise suspicious to investigators.”
Fotis Dulos’s then-girlfriend Michelle Troconis is also being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. According to cops, Mawhinney’s name appeared on an “alibi script” the other two defendants concocted. Troconis allegedly gave several different accounts as to whether she saw him and Fotis Dulos together the morning of Jennifer Dulos’s disappearance. Police also claimed that Fotis Dulos called Mawhinney when discarding evidence; authorities linked the attorney to an apparent human grave found before the murder.
This wasn’t even the first criminal case Mawhinney and Fotis Dulos were implicated in together. The lawyer faces a criminal case for allegedly sexually assaulting his wife, and violating a protective order by having Dulos try to contact her on his behalf.
Mawhinney’s attorneys in the sexual assault and protective order cases didn’t immediately respond to a Law&Crime request for comment. He pleaded not guilty in those cases, but has yet to enter a plea in the Dulos murder case.
Troconis has pleaded not guilty to charges of hiding evidence in the homicide prosecution, but has also yet to enter a plea in her conspiracy charge.
Fotis Dulos has denied having anything to do with his estrange wife’s disappearance.
[Image via Law&Crime Network/Pool]
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