DRUG-COURIER LAWYER DISBARRED FOR LIFE

A Montreal lawyer has been permanently disbarred for using her privileges
to smuggle drugs into five prisons.

Carole Lepire was sentenced to 32 months in prison two years ago for hiding
packages of cocaine, heroin and other drugs in her pocket or among her
legal documents as she visited "clients" across Quebec.

Now, the Barreau du Quebec has made it impossible for her to practice law
in the province again.

In its decision, the bar rejects the notion that Lepire, who had practiced
law for only one year before her arrest in 1998, was suffering from
battered-wife syndrome.

She had testified that it was her ex-con boyfriend, Daniel Lesage, who
forced her to make the deliveries under threat of violence. Although Lesage
was charged with assaulting her before her arrest - and Lepire hid with her
two daughters in a secret location during the proceedings - she had full
access to colleagues, police and judges who might have helped her.

"Instead of having recourse to the judicial system, she discredits it,
trivializing the work of police and probation officers," says the bar's
disciplinary committee.

Among aggravating factors was the sheer number of deliveries Lepire made
from April to October 1998, taking advantage of the fact that lawyers
visiting inmates are rarely searched and are left alone with them.

Lepire made 17 deliveries, ranging from marijuana in the parking lot of the
Joliette courthouse to cocaine and heroin at Bordeaux jail in Montreal to a
package of drugs in the Hells Angels wing of Donnacona penitentiary.

The bar quotes from Quebec Court Judge Andre Bilodeau's decision before
rendering its own: "When a member of the bar commits these kinds of acts,
it is all lawyers, socially speaking, who suffer the disgrace."