by Lisa Backus
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| Disbarred attorney Nickola Cunha will appear Monday in state Superior Court in Middletown after a judge ordered a state marshal to take her into custody for failing to show up at previous appearances. |
MIDDLETOWN — A disbarred attorney who to failed to show up for a May court date to address her disbarment and her use of client funds will appear before a judge Monday after being taken into custody at a Wallingford restaurant over the week.
Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher disbarred former Hamden attorney Nickola Cunha earlier this year after she filed a motion, requesting a family court judge be removed from a pending divorce case because he “showed bias in favor of Jewish litigants and the disabled,” court documents said.
Cunha was slated to appear before Moukawasher in mid-May to provide a trustee with a list of client addresses and phone numbers and to deal with client funds that officials claimed she had inappropriately kept, court documents said. Cunha failed to show up, prompting the judge to issue a capias warrant, ordering state marshals to take her into custody to guarantee her appearance in court.
The deadline for the capias warrant was extended several times, court documents show, before Moukawsher ordered Cunha taken into custody on May 18. She was spotted at a Wallingford restaurant on Friday and taken into custody by a state marshal, according to the Hartford Courant.
Cunha is scheduled to appear Monday in state Superior Court in Middletown.
The state’s Chief Disciplinary Counsel Brian Staines submitted documents on June 1, claiming Cunha had inappropriately taken $78,000 from an accident settlement for a client after she had already withheld her $96,000 fee for handling the case.
Staines also said in the documents that Cuhna originally told the judge she took $30,000 from the client’s accident settlement to pay for previous pro bono work, but “failed to clarify throughout the hearing that the actual amount she took was $78,000.”
“She had no authority from the client to take this money,” Staines wrote in the filing.
Cunha was disbarred in January after Moukawsher ruled she had made “empty and malicious claims,” alleging another judge was engaged in a Judaism-based conspiracy and protected child sexual abuse as part of her representation of a Glastonbury woman engaged in a dissolution of marriage case.
In late April, as part of the ruling, Moukawsher ordered Cunha to turn over her clients’ contact information, along with active and pending files to a court-appointed trustee. The judge noted at the time that a recent withdrawal of $30,000 from a client’s account may have been illegal and required an audit.
Cunha turned over the information for three clients on May 13, according to the trustee who was appointed by the court after her disbarment. But Cunha failed to supply complete information for several other clients, court documents said. The trustee is also looking for financial information for some clients and what Cunha did with their retainers, court documents said.
Ben Lambert contributed to this story.
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