When Legal Help Becomes Legal Hell

WARNING: The following materials, particularly the original documents contained in links below, are of an explicit nature and may disturb some readers. This material should not be read by those under the age of 18.

In late January 2006, an advocate for domestic violence victims summoned a Legal Aid attorney into a witness room in Tazewell County, Va., for an urgent, sensitive conversation.

Shirley Forrester, the advocate, confronted Wade Compton about his sexual involvement with one of her charges – a young mother and domestic violence victim he represented in a child custody case.

To Forrester’s shock, Compton hung his head and acknowledged that sexual contact had occurred, and that he needed to stop. He thanked her for approaching him, and then lofted a revealing, unsettling question that haunts her to this day: “Who was it?”

Last December, 2½ years after his Legal Aid employer fired him and the Virginia State Bar began investigating, Compton – who exclusively represented low-income clients – admitted to improper sexual conduct with four of six women, all Legal Aid clients, who accused him. Two of the women maintained they were raped, giving rise last year to a criminal investigation that remains active by the Virginia State Police.

The Bar ultimately worked out a deal with Compton, suspending his license for five years – the most severe sanction shy of disbarment – while imposing terms that he must continue counseling and undergo a risk assessment before he can return to practice.

Although the case was a “top priority” for the Bar, 10 months elapsed between the filing of the initial complaint and the first interview of a witness, the Bristol Herald Courier has found.

Even as the Bar upholds the disposition of the case as fulfilling its public protection mission, it is at a loss to explain the 10-month lag, which might have added to the difficulty of locating witnesses, risked the erosion of their memories and effectively lengthened the period of time Compton continued to practice law.

In response to a Herald Courier inquiry, a senior Bar official said the organization might need to review its policy on cases involving witnesses known to change their addresses frequently.

Of the five clients who agreed to testify against Compton in the Bar’s disciplinary action, three – contacted independently earlier this month – said Compton’s punishment was too light and that his license should be revoked. Another client declined to comment out of concern it could affect a pending court matter. The fifth client, as well as the one who did not agree to testify, could not be reached.

Compton, 40, a member of a prominent legal family in Lebanon, Va., would not comment on his disciplinary case. He maintained to the Bar that all sexual contact with his clients was consensual and denied that any of it took place in a courthouse, as alleged. As the Bar investigated, he continued to practice at his family’s firm and served as president of the Russell County Bar Association in 2007-08.

Last October, nearly three years after Forrester urged him to seek counseling, Compton claimed he began seeing a mental health counselor in 2008. He also introduced medical evidence of his mental health impairment – a possible mitigating factor in a disciplinary action – and asked the Bar to suspend his license. The board in February suspended his license indefinitely because of that impairment, which is apart from the five-year suspension, and he can petition the board for reinstatement in December 2013.

The Compton case illustrates how introducing sex into an inherently lopsided relationship – in which clients rely utterly on an attorney provided to them at no charge – can erode trust in the legal system at multiple levels, the Herald Courier investigation shows.

It also casts light on the absence of a tool in the Virginia State Bar’s disciplinary kit: a rule – already used by a majority of states – that prohibits sexual relations between attorneys and clients and facilitates the sanctioning of attorneys who engage in such conduct.

The attorney and his clients

When Wade Compton put in for a staff attorney opening at the Southwest Virginia Legal Aid Society in September 2002, the program director was thrilled.
SVLAS is a nonprofit that provides free legal services to low-income clients in family law, such as divorce and child custody cases. The Russell County Bar Association appointed Compton the previous year to the Legal Aid board, and he had seven years of experience in practicing family law – more experience than most of the program’s applicants, said Larry Harley, the director.

He came with a good pedigree: His father, Eugene Compton, ran a successful law practice in Lebanon, and his mother, Dollie, also an attorney, served as clerk of the Russell County Circuit Court. His brother, Nick, had joined the family practice. Dollie and Nick Compton both now work in the Buchanan County Commonwealth’s Attorney Office.

Wade Compton had a nice courtroom presence. He was articulate. He dressed well. He knew all of the attorneys and the judges, recalled Forrester, the victims advocate in the Tazewell Commonwealth’s Attorney Office.

“I felt comfortable with his ability in the courtroom and the job he was doing,” Forrester said in a recent interview.

For Forrester, who aided many victims without the financial means to hire an attorney, a Legal Aid lawyer was something of a godsend.

One of the most common reasons women return to abusive relationships, Forrester said, “is because they have no ability to fight in court” for custody of their children.

Forrester trusted Compton implicitly. She spoke highly of him to the victims she aided, referred them to Legal Aid, and passed him information about his clients when she thought it might help. An advocate since 1999, she considered herself astute and cynical. She saw no red flags about Compton, who now works at the information technology firm CGI in Lebanon.

Sgt. Tim Hopson, a Russell County sheriff’s deputy and associate pastor at the church the Comptons attend, called Wade Compton “one of the finest people that I know.”
A former Legal Aid client, as she testified against Compton, stated repeatedly that she had nothing against him personally.

But one thing neither Forrester nor Harley saw in Compton was a quality that Compton later declared “is known by anyone that knows me.”

“I am a flirt by nature,” he wrote in a June 2006 letter to the Bar.

In fact, this side of Compton was evident to clients meeting him for the first time, interviews with witnesses, Bar investigative reports and court documents show.

By last summer, six of Compton’s Legal Aid clients had given similar accounts to a Bar investigator of encounters with Compton in witness rooms between 2004 and 2006.

Several of them describe how the attorney’s compliments about their appearances turned crude and evolved into unwanted sexual advances. The clients had cases pending in Scott, Tazewell and Russell counties, and only two of them knew one another. The Herald Courier is only naming those women – several of whom are victims of domestic violence and fear for their safety – who gave the newspaper their consent.

Each client claimed that Compton made a pass at her in a witness room; two alleged more serious offenses that took place out of court.

For Charissa Sturgill, then a 29-year-old mother of two in a divorce and child custody battle, Compton made her uncomfortable from their first meeting.

Sturgill’s ex-husband, Compton later wrote in a divorce pleading, had inflicted on her “great mental anguish, physical injury resulting in permanent disability, and apprehension of future serious bodily harm to herself and fear for her mental and emotional well being.”

But by this stage of the divorce, Sturgill had been equally traumatized by her attorney, she said in a recent interview.

In spring 2004, Sturgill said she and Compton entered a jury room in the Scott County Courthouse – a long room with a window at the end that looks out on a parking lot across the street. In that meeting, Compton asked her to point out her vehicle to him through the window, and as she approached the end of the room, “he came from behind me like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere. By the time I’d move his hand from one place, it was in another.”

Compton flatly denied this to the Bar. He pointed out that the jury room Sturgill described has a window in the door and would allow anyone in the hallway to see what is happening inside.

But peering in from the hallway, it is not possible to glimpse the end of the room, where Sturgill claims Compton grabbed her – a detail that later struck her as too precise to be coincidental.

Soon after this incident, she saw Compton speak with another client, a neighbor of hers, and surmised by a facial tick he made that the two were sexually involved – a guess later borne out by the Bar’s investigation.

Though the incidents took place years ago, Sturgill remembers, with trenchant clarity, details like the blue sundress she wore on a day in June 2004, when she was surprised to find Compton at her doorstep.

Compton carried a manila folder, a flip pad and pencil, but was not dressed in his typical suit and tie. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. He told her he needed to speak with her about her case, and Sturgill, not wanting to discuss matters where her neighbors could hear, let him in.

She remembers experiencing the events as if from somewhere outside herself, more observer than participant.

Compton laid his pencil and pad on a coffee table, she said. She went into the kitchen. He grabbed her, hoisting her onto a wobbly high table that her mother and father had
made. She struggled, momentarily worrying about falling and thinking of the steel plate that holds her neck together – the result of a beating by her now ex-husband. She didn’t scream. She doesn’t know why.

She broke free and ran upstairs to the bedroom. Compton pursued her upstairs and the intercourse that ensued, she said, was unprotected and not consensual.

In Compton’s version, it is Sturgill who initiates the sexual contact, straddling him as he sat on her couch and closing the blinds, he told Bar investigator Jim Whitener in January 2008.

Compton said he and Sturgill engaged in mutual fondling – his attorney called it “foreplay” – and said the two engaged in consensual intercourse.

He told the Bar he would produce correspondence from Sturgill to rebut her allegations that the sex was not consensual, but there is no record of it in the court file and Whitener does not elaborate in his report.

Sturgill never complained about Compton while he was her attorney, and it was not until March 2007 that she told anyone he raped her.

Asked why she did not report it sooner, she said: “Not with my child in [Compton’s] hands.”

She was terrified, she said, that Compton might retaliate by telling the judge, “She agrees to give up custody, she’s going to pay so much money in child support, she’s only going to see her kid once a month.”

Years ago, Sturgill said, she was living out of state, failed to attend a hearing and lost custody of her daughter, her oldest child, for four years – a vulnerability that Compton knew. “I flat out told him I can’t go through that again. … I would’ve gave my life up fighting for that child,” she said of her now 8-year-old son.

Though she did not learn until much later, her Duffield, Va., neighbor had a parallel story to tell. That client told the Bar investigator that Compton initiated sexual contact within 30 minutes of their first meeting in a Scott County witness room. She felt she had to submit to Compton, who represented her in a child custody case.

Whitener, the Bar’s investigator for Southwest Virginia, spent a year and a half tracking down this client, and noted in his February 2008 report to the Bar, “it was only reluctantly that she agreed to meet.” Efforts to contact the client independently were unsuccessful. Whitener, based in Blacksburg, Va., did not return phone messages seeking comment.

In 2005, Compton stepped into a Russell County witness room with another client, just before a child custody hearing, and turned the topic to sex, said Emily Crabtree, then 24.
At his suggestion, she performed oral sex on him, thinking he would represent her better at the hearing, she testified in a deposition in October.

In their phone conversations, the two rarely if ever discussed her case, said Crabtree, who is serving time for a probation violation for petit larceny convictions.

“He provoked it because I never would have done it in the [witness] room,” she said in a telephone interview from a Southampton County, Va., jail. “He was a lawyer. I trusted him. I guessed he knew what he was doing.”

Crabtree was aware the relationship was inappropriate at the time, and later worried that it impacted her case, but resolved not to tell anyone but her mother.

Asked why, she said: “His mother was the clerk of the Circuit Court. His family are these Compton & Compton big lawyers. If I had said anything, they probably would have switched it around and got me for slander and not believed me and run my name through the mud. Who was going to believe me?”

Other accusations

Three other women, whom Compton represented in family law cases in Tazewell, also accused him.

A 35-year-old mother of two, a victim of domestic abuse, said that Compton’s representation began with compliments, which he also confirmed to the Bar. As she left a witness room with him, he asked her for a kiss and she complied, she wrote in a May 2006 statement to the Bar.

But when Compton showed up twice at her residence for an arranged meeting, she said she was too scared to let him in and hid.

“Mr. Compton scared me,” the client wrote in her statement. “Ever since this happened I didn’t trust men, especially lawyers and or court service. Because of all this my child is gone and I’m afraid to talk to another lawyer about my case.”

Compton denied any sexual contact with this client, and told the Bar that she had approached him in the Tazewell courthouse after he no longer represented her, without evident fear.

Ironically, the allegation that led to Compton’s firing and sparked the Bar complaint was not completely true.

In the summer of 2005, Legal Aid assigned Compton to the child custody case of a 24-year-old Richlands native – a woman in a particularly fragile state.

The woman said she left her husband after he beat her and fired a gun at her, and she was suffering from panic attacks while trying to quit using drugs. When contacted by the Herald Courier, she was in hiding at the residence of a family member who did not take phone calls from unknown male callers.

Compton was the first attorney who had ever represented her, and when he told her in a Tazewell witness room that she was pretty, she thought he was trying to build up her self-esteem, she said in an interview late last month.

But in subsequent phone conversations, Compton began asking personal questions, she said, and would “try to get me to meet him out places.”

Though he never said it explicitly, “It come across to me that he wanted me to go to bed with him and stuff in order to take care of my case,” she said.

In October 2005, Compton ultimately prevailed on her to drive with him to her marital residence, where she hoped to pick up some of her belongings. In his car, she recalled, he showed her pictures of his sons and “he told me that other girls, other clients of his – he didn’t name no names – he had relationships with, it wasn’t an uncommon thing.”

He said, she remembered, “that they had went farther with him than I would.”

He kissed and fondled her, she said. “I was standoffish with him, but I didn’t do nothing to really put a stop to it.”

Returning home, her mother commented on her disheveled appearance and, out of frustration, she blurted out that she had given Compton oral sex, though she had not.

She did not mention the incident to anyone else, and shortly afterwards reunited with her husband, ending the litigation.

“I don’t know if this drove me back into the situation that I tried to get out of; it just messed with my head quite a bit,” she said.

“It made me wonder when I went to court what the other attorneys was thinking, or if any of the rest of them were like that. It put a big question in my mind,” she said.

A few months later, the client’s mother contacted Forrester, the victims advocate, and told her what she believed happened between her daughter and Compton.

Finding the allegation both troubling and credible, Forrester sought an audience with Compton, eventually pulling him into a witness room in late January 2006. That month, in the same Tazewell courthouse, a sixth Legal Aid client would later complain that Compton had pushed her up against a wall in a witness room and fondled her – an encounter he did not specifically remember but an allegation he denied.

In Forrester’s meeting with Compton, he assured her that his relationship with the 24-year-old Richlands victim was “never consummated, but not for lack of my trying,” Forrester wrote in a May 2006 statement to the Bar.

Forrester expressed her alarm to Compton that his client’s husband could come after him, his wife and his children.

“He agreed, yes, that he could lose everything – his family, his job, and his ability to practice law,” Forrester wrote.

She urged him to seek counseling. He refused.

On March 21, 2006, Forrester contacted Harley, Compton’s boss, and set up a meeting with him. Four days later, Harley discharged Compton for his conduct, and began contacting his former clients.

| (276) 645-2558

Coming Monday: The majority of states prohibit sex between lawyers and their clients. Virginia and Tennessee are not among them. We also examine why a high-priority case languished for months.