Report: Lawyer should be disbarred

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Sept. 28 (UPI) -- A lawyer who represented people injured by the diet drug fen-phen should be disbarred for violating ethics rules, a Kentucky hearing officer has recommended.

While Melbourne Mills Jr. was acquitted of stealing millions from a $200 million fen-phen settlement, he nonetheless engaged in "dishonest, fraud and deceit," Marcia Ridings, a hearing officer for the Kentucky Bar Association, said in her report to the bar and the state Supreme Court.

Mills failed to report misconduct by law colleagues William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham, who were sentenced last month to 25 and 20 years, respectively, for defrauding clients out of tens of millions of dollars in Kentucky's fen-phen settlement, the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal reported Monday.

"He was a lawyer," Ridings said of Mills. "He either knew, or should have known what was going on was dishonest and unethical."

Mills, during his trial last year, testified he was too drunk to understand what Gallion and Cunningham were doing.

Gallion, Cunningham and Mills represented 440 Kentucky residents who said they were injured by fen-phen, withdrawn from the market in the 1990s after it was shown to cause heart damage.