This Tenth Circuit case illustrates the sadly familiar problems that arise when lawyers fail to provide even basic assistance for their clients. In this case, the government sought to deport Mr. Alejandre-Gallegos on the ground that he had committed a crime of “moral turpitude.” Mr. Alejandre-Gallegos went to the expense of hiring a lawyer to argue that he wasn’t guilty of such a crime. But the lawyer failed to provide anything approaching competent legal representation. Too often people get only as much justice as they can afford; sometimes they don’t even get that much.
Worried that he could be deported for his unlawful presence in this country, Santiago Alejandre-Gallegos sought discretionary relief under a statute that allows the Attorney General to “cancel” a deportation that would result in “unusual hardship” to an alien’s U.S. citizen family members. An Immigration Judge denied the request and so did the Board of Immigration Appeals. No matter how hard the hardship, the Board noted, an applicant can’t win cancellation of removal if he has been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude. And, the Board observed, Mr. Alejandre-Gallegos has pleaded guilty to at least one such offense.
Now before us, Mr. Alejandre-Gallegos seeks to undo this decision but his attorney fails to give us any grounds on which we might. Counsel suggests the Board relied on improper evidence but doesn’t supply any citations to the record where it went wrong on the facts. He suggests that the Board applied the wrong legal standards but doesn’t cite any legal authority that might remotely support his claim. He even spends pages discussing another criminal charge against his client irrelevant to the one on which the Board relied. Neither are counsel’s shortcomings confined to such important things. His statement of related cases includes argument. He does not “cite the precise reference in the record where [each of his issues] was raised and ruled on” and his statement of the case includes no record citations at all. His brief contains no “summary of the argument.” He hasn’t even bothered to “alphabetically arrange[]” his table of authorities. We could go on.
Essentially, counsel pronounces that the Board mistook the facts and acted in defiance of law and leaves it to the court to go fish for facts and law that might possibly support his claim. This, of course, the court has no obligation and is poorly positioned to do. In our adversarial system, neutral and busy courts rely on lawyers to develop and present in an intelligible format the facts and law to support their arguments and “[t]he adversarial process cannot properly function when one party ignores its obligations under the rules.” For that reason it’s within the court’s power “to dismiss an appeal when the appellant has failed to abide by the rules of appellate procedure.” That’s the course we find ourselves forced to take in this case.
We confess reluctance about having to proceed so summarily and about having to chastise a professional colleague in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and surely judges no less than lawyers. But the shortcomings here don’t just suggest a mistake, a few, or even a thoroughgoing disinterest in the rules of procedure. They suggest a lack of competent representation. For all we know from counsel’s garbled submission before us, his client may have a good claim or at least an arguable one: we just cannot tell. That worry occupied us so much that we decided to review counsel’s past filings in this court to see if his conduct here was (hopefully) anomalous. But the results proved even more disquieting. They revealed that for at least a decade counsel has represented in this court immigrants seeking relief from removal—and that for at least that long his filings in this court have consistently suffered from the sort of shortcomings present in this one. It turns out that this court has noted the problem time and again. It has reminded counsel of his professional obligations. It has admonished him. All to no effect.
At some point, this court has a duty to do more than observe, record, and warn. It has a duty to act. After reviewing the record before us, we are confident that time has more than come. Because we believe sanctions—including suspension from this court’s bar and restitution—may be appropriate, we direct the Clerk to initiate a disciplinary proceeding.