Concerning Okoampa’s Complaint to the State Bar of Texas

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo

Last Monday, I was having a good time with a Ghanaian judge who arrived from Detroit to spend the holidays with me here in Austin when an issue came up to annoy me a little. I have known that gentleman for nearly thirty years since my days at the University of Ghana where, as drama students, we remained the best of friends. When I heard that he was in the country to pursue an LLM degree at Wayne’s State University, I was very excited to invite him over to my home here in Austin. When he arrived, I hurriedly decided to show him my modest law office. But my day was nearly spoiled when I found from the bunch of my day’s letters one from The Chief Disciplinary Counsel of the State Bar of Texas. Of all letters, that is the last one any lawyer wanted in his mail: Somebody had filed a complaint against me and wanted me disciplined! I could be disbarred, suspended or censured and have my record sullied. My career was on the line!

I began thinking of two Burkinabe exiles I was filing asylum for and who infuriated me so much that I returned their documents to them and withdrew from their case. Were they demanding their non-refundable retainer? I quickly opened the letter and read the following:

The office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel of the State Bar of Texas has received the above-referenced Grievance, a copy of which is enclosed for your information.

This office has examined the Grievance and determined that the information alleged does not demonstrate Professional Misconduct or a Disability pursuant to the Texas Rules of Disciplinary Procedure. This matter has therefore been classified as an Inquiry and has been dismissed. The complainant may appeal this determination to the Board of Disciplinary Appeals. No action on your part is necessary at this time…………

Pursuant to Texas Government Code Section 81.072(0), if a Grievance is dismissed as an Inquiry and that dismissal has become final, an attorney may deny that the dismissed Grievance was pursued………….

Signed:

K.W. Morgan,

Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel.

At this point, without looking for the “above referenced Grievant”, I was already relieved because if a case has been dismissed as an Inquiry, it was euphemism for “dismissal with all the contempt imaginable”. So all the rest of the verbiage was moot to me. I commended the Board for having the good sense to inform lawyers of the status of a case right in the opening paragraphs. But in my momentary agitation, I had entirely failed to look for the source and nature of the complaint against me. I began to search, but most of the following pages were blank since they concerned attorney-client transactions in which a client may be aggrieved. But the question number 3 states:

Explain in detail why you think this attorney has done something improper or has failed to do something which should have been done. The answer read:

:

“Mr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo routinely writes articles which he publishes on Ghanaweb.com (sic) defaming me (Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe Jr., Ph.D.) and passing himself off as Doctoral Degree Holder, although he has only a JD degree, and not an LLD or Ph.D in Law or even an LLM degree.

Two of the articles in which I have been defamed by Mr. Adjei Sarfo are as follows:

“In support of the Legalization of Hard Drugs” Ghanaweb.com Dec. 4, 2014

In Support of the Legalization of Marijuana Ghanaweb.com Mar. 23, 2014.”

Scrolling down to question number 6, I read the following:

If you did not hire the attorney, what is your connection with the attorney? Explain briefly. The answer read:

“Mr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo has written several articles on the website called Ghanaweb.com (sic) in which he has called me names including “drug dealer”, “orangutan” and “cocaine addict”. I have never met the man or (sic) communicated with him. I have, however, warned in the Ghanaweb.com comments forum of my intention to either launch (sic) a lawsuit against him or report his behavior to the Texas Bar, since he attacks me in the guise of his occupation as a licensed lawyer.”

Information about the complainant read:

Mr/Mrs Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe Jr.

Date of Birth 04/8/14.

Now as a Black male lawyer actively practicing in the courts here in America, I don’t ordinarily care about people reporting me anywhere and I encourage people with grievance to do so any time. Constituting less than 3% of the attorney population here in America, many people, black male attorneys are often seen as an aberration in the system who are better off huddling with the over 60% of their kind incarcerated in the prison system or roaming aimlessly in the streets. So people will report you if only because they want to purge the system of that aberration undermining their notion of the typical Black male. When a judge threatened to report me, I told him point blank that he could make my day. I thereafter had him recused from my case much to his chagrin. He did not make good of his threat. Six months into my practice, a lady reported me to the Chief Disciplinary Counsel. The substance of her report was that I was refusing to use an Accident Reconstruction Expert she had strongly recommended. My refusal to use that expert was because after carefully interviewing him, I decided that his theory was not going to support our case. In other words, he was going to lose us the case! Like Okoampa-Ahoofe’s case against me, the woman’s complaint to the Board was summarily dismissed as an Inquiry.

But there is some sense, albeit a tenuous one, to be made in this complainant’s action: she was virtually uneducated and had no means of deciphering the intellectual rigors required in the analyses of the law. In Okoampa’s case, he is a Ph.D holder for God’s sake, and if for nothing at all, he should be able to make a prima facie case of some sort that will earn him an initial hearing of some sort. Kwame is a drug junkie and a drug dealer all right, but to designate him as an orangutan does some injustice to those noble primates. He is far below them.

In the first place, a responsible scholar must do the due diligence of researching his topics well. If Okoampa had been that responsible, he would have discovered the true meaning of defamation. Truth is a defense to defamation, and so also is mere opinion. Besides, for a cause of action to mature as defamation, the defamatory statement must not be merely generalized, but particularized or detailed. Under these circumstances, nothing I have said about that man even rises closely to defamation, and if Okoampa had any doubts about this, he should have consulted an attorney who would have guided him, instead of making a fool of himself and bringing shame to scholarship and the Ghanaian people.

His case is even worse with this whole JD issue. JD means Juris Doctor/Doctor of Jurisprudence both of which means doctor of Law. The conferment of this degree has all the rituals, ceremonies and practices attached to any doctoral degree including the Ph.D. What is more, it designates expertise in the profession of the law up to the highest levels. The requirement for law professors, Supreme Court judges and the most astute lawyers in the international world of jurisprudence is the JD, nothing else, and these are facts that can be easily verified through the most superficial of research. That is why those people to whom Okoampa reported who also have the JD just like me and are in no way more qualified than me must have been pissed off by the man’s presumption and grand-standing that a Juris Doctor (Latin for Doctor of Law) Holder is not a Doctoral Degree Holder.

Given the above, Okoampa’s complaint is unimaginably infantile. But what is more serious is that it portrays his scholarship and commonsense in a rather bad light far beyond the pit into which his evil writings have sunk him. There is a Ph.D holder babbling stuff like a seven month old baby to a highly specialized legal group. The members will be affirming their own prejudices against Blacks and Africans they wrongly presume to be uneducable or inferior. Moreover, it will wipe off the wisdom often attributed to the native Ghanaian living in America. Finally, it confirms my own doubts about the purpose of our own education insofar as it creates monsters and parasites in our society.

Okoampa is on paper a very educated man. I taught English at all levels of the educational ladder both here in America and in Ghana, and I can confirm on authority that he is one of the most proficient writers of the language in the whole world. But he is probably the most stupid scholar in the whole world because his writings are utterly divisive and toxic. Before I encountered Okoampa on Ghanaweb, I never dreamed in all my life that there exists in this world such a nincompoop wearing the Ph.D accolade. My personal dislike for him is simply on account of his hereditary ethnocentrism, and nothing else. We belong to the same party, the same language-subgroup, the same region……But Okoampa’s ethnocentrism permeates all his writings in terms unprecedented in our society.

I will not dwell on the sentiments and doubts of the readers who are genuinely disturbed by Okoampa’s malicious intent toward a fellow Ghanaian. All I can say is that when you finish imagining the lowest point any punk will go in his foolhardiness, Okoampa will always trump your imagination and surprise you with far worse behavior. Again when you think of the extent to which any ordinary tramp will go to destroy his perceived enemies, be sure to conclude also that Okoampa is limitless in his wickedness: he has no sense of proportion and no power of inhibition. Today, the nadir of his intellectual level has come to light by his puerile complaint against me. When he made it, he was imagining the worst of all evils upon my career and life. He has miserably failed, even as he has failed to cover up his true character as the worst scholar in the whole world.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Doctor of Laws, is a general legal practitioner resident in Austin, Texas, USA. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com