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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the professional fitness frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Professional fitness frame
An attorney who repeatedly committed domestic violence, blew off his court-ordered remediation, and then verbally abused bar officials has demonstrated exactly the kind of poor judgment and propensity for violence that disqualifies someone from practicing law.
Self-sabotage spectacle frame
The remarkable feature here isn't the disbarment itself but the respondent's own performance — taunting the court, boasting about military violence, dismissing his crimes as 'felonious peccadillos' — a near-textbook case of a lawyer talking himself into the harshest possible sanction.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot A
The license is a public trust
A legal ethics professor would argue —
A bar card isn't a credential you keep until someone proves you shouldn't have it; it's a continuing representation to clients, courts, and the public that you possess the judgment fit to wield legal power. Barlean choked an intimate partner, was charged, and then while out on bond pushed the same woman down a flight of stairs. Offered a deferred sentence — a second chance most defendants would treasure — he didn't bother completing the anger management, the assessments, or the treatment he'd agreed to. His own argument that discipline is pointless because he barely practices misses the entire premise of licensure. The Oklahoma Supreme Court was right: a documented propensity for violence against intimates, coupled with contempt for court-ordered remediation, is incompatible with holding a license in good standing.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.