Summary: A personal injury attorney accused of stealing $100,000 from his clients has pleaded not guilty to three counts of thefts.
Attorney James Grant King, 43, allegedly stole over $100,000 from his personal injury clients, but on Monday, he pled not guilty during his jailhouse arraignment in Paducah, Kentucky.
According to The Paducah Sun, King was under investigation for months by the McCracken County Sheriff’s Department after one of King’s former clients complained that they had never received $93,000 from their car accident settlement with Nationwide Insurance. Police said that within six weeks of taking the case, King had settled the claim and collected the check, even though he had never consulted with his clients for their approval on the amount.
After the attorney was arrested for the $93,000 theft, another former client came forward and said King had never paid them the $17,500 they were owed. They too had been in a car accident, and the insurance company had issued a check to King Law, without the client’s approval.
Police said that King had used half of his clients’ money on personal expenses and the other half he had used for his business expenses such as paying back other clients.
McCracken Sheriff’s Detective Matt Carter told The Paducah Sun that since the attorney’s arrest, there have been other calls from possible victims that the department is investigating. Carter said that it could take weeks to verify the claims but that they are taking the calls seriously.
Before King’s arrest for the alleged theft, he already had a shady history of misappropriating client money. In 2014, King’s law license was suspended by the Kentucky Supreme Court for 181 days after he was accused of allegedly using client settlement funds in 2010 and 2012 to pay for personal debts such as his mortgage payments. In addition to the suspension, he was forced to complete an Ethics and Professionalism Enhancement Program, and state documents reveal that he had paid those clients their money back.
King had also been in trouble before his suspension because of multiple DUIs. In 2007, he was arrested in McCracken County, and in 2009, he drove drunk again in Massac County, Illinois.
But those two arrests taught the troubled attorney nothing. In 2010, King was arrested for a third DUI in Kentucky, and police charged him with child endangerment when he revealed to them that his son was home alone in their unlocked house. Police investigated the allegation, and King’s son was eventually sent to live with his grandmother.
In 2011, the Board of Governors of the Kentucky Bar Association finally acknowledged King’s erratic behavior and issued a public reprimand as a response to his recent DUI.
King is currently in jail on a $60,000 cash bond, and he will appear at a preliminary hearing on May 9.
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Source: The Paducah Sun