Lawyer Suspended for Chucking Poop-Filled Can

"Very few, if any, prior cases offer guidance regarding the appropriate sanction for the misconduct at issue here," Ohio's Supreme Court said in a ruling on an attorney who admitted throwing a Pringles can filled with his own feces into the parking lot of a crime victim-advocacy center. The court decided to suspend Jack Allen Blakeslee for at least six months, Cleveland.com reports. The can landed near the car of the center's director, Michelle Carpenter Wilkinson. Blakeslee then went to a pretrial hearing for a client facing a possible death sentences. Carpenter Wilkinson, who knew Blakeslee professionally, was at the same hearing and had attended previous hearings in the case.

Blakeslee, who received his Ohio law license in 1976, admitted that he had thrown similar poop-filled cans from his car at least 10 times "to blow off steam," WKRC reports. He said he "got a kick" out of imagining the surprise on people's faces when they found them. He claimed it also could have been a "protest of some kind." When asked exactly what he was protesting, he replied, "Well, we all protest something," per Cleveland.com. He claimed he chose his targets at random and didn't know he was throwing the can into the center's parking lot, though the court noted that after bringing the can from his home 20 minutes away, he slowly drove past the parking lot twice, passing the center's signs, before hurling it.

The court suspended Blakeslee's license for a year, with half the punishment suspended. Evidence shows that "despite societal standards of cleanliness and decorum, Blakeslee failed to control his own bizarre impulses to place feces-filled cans out in public for unsuspecting people to find," the opinion stated. "His aberrant conduct has adversely reflected on his own fitness to practice law and brought discredit to the profession through significant media attention." Blakeslee previously pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and littering and was fined $248 plus court costs. (More lawyer stories.)