More Turnover at Cristina Gutierrez’s Law Firm in 1999

Following up on my post from Friday, it looks like there was additional turnover at Cristina Gutierrez’s law firm in 1999. In this case, the turnover seems like it might have had a greater detrimental effect on Adnan’s case.

Here’s another version of the letterhead from Gutierrez’s firm in 1999:

As you can see, one of the attorneys at Gutierrez’s firm in 1999 was Martin. It appears as if Martin left the law firm in July 1999 and started his own firm. Why is this important? According to the prison visitation records, Martin was with Gutierrez when she first met with Adnan on April 16, 1999:

Moreover, Martin, by himself, next met with Adnan on May 18th:

Gutierrez wouldn’t meet again with Adnan until May 28th.

What does this mean? Who knows. But it’s easy to see how some things could have fallen through the cracks when the first person from Gutierrez’s firm who met with Adnan twice left her law firm as the pretrial process geared up in July.

Another of the attorneys who worked at Gutierrez’s firm in 1999 was Kanwisher. He’s the one who completed the affidavit that was Exhibit 1 in Adnan’s latest filing. According to that affidavit, he worked at Gutierrez’s law firm until 1999 and worked exclusively for Gutierrez. His affidavit also indicates that he was familiar with Gutierrez’s work in preparing alibi defenses/notices, implying that he worked on these alibi issues with Gutierrez.

We know that Gutierrez only had law clerks working on the alibi issues in Adnan’s case, and I’ve been asked many times whether this is typical. It is not, and it seems like we now know why it happened. The attorney who usually handled these issues for Gutierrez had left the firm in February 1999, and no attorney, as far as I can tell, had taken his place.

-CM