Two Boardman lawyers may face discipline
YOUNGSTOWN
A probable-cause panel has certified complaints against two Boardman lawyers to the Ohio Supreme Court’s Board of Commissioners on Grievances and Discipline in Columbus.
The lawyers, Heidi A. Hanni and Bruce Martin Broyles, have been asked to file answers to the complaints and are entitled to a hearing on the complaints.
The Mahoning County Bar Association filed the complaint against Hanni, which alleges she failed to appear four times for scheduled office appointments in 2013 and 2014 and twice for scheduled court hearings in 2014 in a Columbiana County child-custody dispute, without providing good reasons for not showing up in court.
Hanni refunded $500 of the $2,968 paid to her by the couple who had hired her to represent them, the complaint said.
The couple went on to represent themselves and won their case, the complaint added.
In an earlier disciplinary case, the state’s top court suspended Hanni’s law license for six months in 2010, but stayed the entire suspension.
That suspension was based on Mahoning County Bar Association complaints she failed to zealously represent a man, who unsuccessfully sought to withdraw his guilty plea to aggravated vehicular homicide, and that she made unfounded allegations against county Prosecutor Paul J. Gains’ office on a radio show in her unsuccessful attempt to unseat Gains in the 2008 Democratic primary.
Hanni collected, and later refunded, $2,500 to represent the man, who sought to withdraw his plea, but she failed to make any oral or written motions on the court record for him to do that, thereby failing to preserve the issue for a potential appeal, the bar association said.
The man was sentenced to four years in prison.
Hanni apologized for her comments about Gains’ office on the Louie Free radio program.
In the other recently certified case, the top court’s disciplinary counsel alleges that Broyles represented a foreclosing bank in 2011, then represented the couple, whose home that bank was foreclosing on, the following year in the same court case.
In May 2012, a magistrate found that Broyles had a conflict of interest and granted the bank’s motion to disqualify Broyles from the Mahoning County Common Pleas Court case, according to the complaint.
Neither Hanni nor her lawyer, John B. Juhasz Jr., nor Broyles, could be reached to comment.