A Westside lawyer, who used the promise of criminal justice reform to sign up thousands of inmate clients, has agreed to be disbarred for misleading prisoners and their families about their chances for release.
With a filing in State Bar Court on Tuesday, Aaron Spolin pleaded no contest to misconduct involving eight clients, all current or former California prisoners, and consented to the stripping of his law license.
The stipulation signed by Spolin, his lawyer and a bar prosecutor stated that Spolin “promoted false hopes in his clients and their families that the clients’ sentences would be reduced when in fact that was highly unlikely.”
The Times revealed in stories two years ago how Spolin persuaded inmates’ families, most of them of limited means, to shell out fees of up to $30,000 for services that he knew or should have known had no chance of freeing them.
Spolin, a 39-year-old practicing in California since 2016, had a clean record until last year, when the bar filed a pair of disciplinary actions against his license. Disbarment is a rare result for an attorney’s first offense, but in a statement, the bar’s top prosecutor, Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona, said Spolin’s conduct warranted it.
“California attorneys are sworn to a duty to act in the best interests of their clients,” Cardona said. “Mr. Spolin failed in that duty by misleading inmates and their families and charging them unconscionable fees for his own personal gain. This was serious misconduct justifying disbarment.”
Spolin and his lawyers did not return messages seeking comment. His attorneys disclosed in court papers last year that he was the subject of a parallel criminal investigation by the state attorney general’s office. The status of that probe is not clear.
A Princeton graduate, Spolin drew on a stint as a McKinsey consultant to launch his high-volume firm in Los Angeles. He recognized a host of new criminal justice reform laws in 2019 could be big business and told The Times in 2023 that he drew on his time at the consulting company “analyzing how different companies could expand to be successful” to embrace new techniques in his law business.
Among his approaches were buying up Google search terms so families looking for information about criminal justice reform were directed to his website, using fill-in-the-blank templates for legal documents and outsourcing work to lawyers in developing countries who were paid about $10 an hour.
He and a small group of attorneys worked remotely or from a co-working space on Olympic Boulevard, and he seldom went to court or met incarcerated clients or their families in person. He pitched himself as an expert in securing prisoners’ release in phone conference calls that families described as upbeat and hopeful.
His website was filled with boasts about his accomplishments — though not all were honest. From 2020 to shortly after The Times stories in 2023, a press release on the site crowed, “Governor publicly announces commutation of sentence for Spolin Law client,” according to the stipulation filed this week. The client, James Heard, told the newspaper that he had filled out the commutation paperwork himself and Spolin’s claim was “intentionally misleading.”
Though Spolin represented some 2,000 clients, the disbarment stems from his handling of a fraction of them — seven men serving sentences from L.A. and one from Orange County.
The attorney recommended family members pay him $14,700 to seek the inmate’s release through a new state law that allowed local district attorneys to pursue resentencing of an inmate to a shorter term.
What Spolin did not inform families was that their relatives, convicted of murder, kidnapping and other violent offenses, did not meet the criteria in Los Angeles or Orange counties — and that prosecutors there had repeatedly told him of their policies in writing.
Firm employees gave families the opposite impression, according to stipulation. A case manager reassured the fiancée of an L.A. man on death row that resentencing was a real prospect, telling her in 2022, “We probably have 50 petitions [submitted to the LADA] and only a few have been denied,” according to the filing.
Another lawyer working for Spolin, Jeremy Cutcher, told the sister of Wesner Charles Jr., serving 27 years to life for attempted carjacking and robbery, that resentencing will “get him out” in six to eight months, according to the filing.
Cutcher, who left the firm, did not return a message seeking comment.
Told of Spolin’s disbarment Wednesday, Charles, 42, of Los Angeles, said he was relieved.
“He’s a con artist,” said Charles. With the help of another lawyer working for free, he won release last year after 22 years in prison and said he was still working to formally establish his innocence. “Harming other people and taking advantage of family members, that’s not a good thing.”
Spolin had previously refunded some of the eight clients money previously, and he was ordered to reimburse others as part of disbarment proceedings.
The state Supreme Court still must approve Spolin’s disbarment, but his license will be inactive in the meantime, barring him from working as a lawyer. On Wednesday, his firm website still billed him and his employees as the “Top 1% of Criminal Attorneys Nationally.”
