Wichita lawyer broke rules when talking about drug informant, KS high court says

The Kansas Supreme Court publicly censured a Wichita lawyer who represented two people involved in the same drug-related criminal matter.

David L. Miller, according to the decision Thursday, was found to have disclosed the identity of a confidential informant, one of his clients, to a person the informant allegedly bought drugs from, also one of his clients.

Miller broke the code of the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct, specifically a provision that prohibits Kansas attorneys from revealing any information relating to the representation of a client without informed consent, according to a 28-page disciplinary report.

The report showed that one of Miller’s clients bought marijuana from one of his other clients sometime in 2022 or earlier.

The latter client was charged in Sedgwick County for alleged drug- and firearms-related crimes in 2022. The clients were not named in the report.

A disciplinary panel said Miller “was attempting to determine whether he had a conflict of interest and went about it poorly,” but that he did not divulge the informant’s identity knowingly, according to the report.

The costs associated with the proceedings that led to the panel’s finding and report were to be paid by Miller, the report said. Miller was first licensed to practice law in Kansas in 2016.

An email to Miller’s law office was not immediately returned on Thursday.