Jodi Arias attorney faces suspension after writing book

PHOENIX — Laurence "Kirk" Nurmi, who was dragged to the depths of social-media infamy for representing killer Jodi Arias during her two highly publicized trials, has signed an agreement to be suspended from practicing law for four years because he published a book about the case.

Late last month, the Attorney Discipline Probable Cause Committee of the Arizona Supreme Court authorized the State Bar of Arizona to file a formal complaint against Nurmi. Rather than face a disciplinary hearing and possible disbarment, Nurmi entered into a consent agreement with the Bar.

The agreement, which has yet to be approved by the Arizona attorney disciplinary judge, claims that Nurmi violated attorney ethics rules by revealing the content of confidential conversations he had with Arias and her family, and by revealing evidence that had been ruled inadmissible by the trial judge. The agreement also notes that Nurmi made disparaging remarks about Arias over the course of the book and in subsequent media interviews promoting it. Such ethical lapses could be punished by disbarment.

Arias killed her sometime lover, Travis Alexander, in the bathroom of his Mesa home in 2008. Nurmi was appointed to defend her the next year while he was working for the Maricopa County Public Defender's Office. But in 2011, Nurmi resigned from that office to start up a private practice and tried repeatedly to be removed from the Arias case. The court denied the request.

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The trial began in January 2012 and became a social-media sensation, partly due to live streaming and partly because of the showmanship of the case prosecutor, Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Juan Martinez. There were naked photos of Arias and Alexander that went viral online, along with erotic emails, texts and phone recordings.

Martinez battled with Nurmi and Nurmi's co-counsel, Jennifer Willmott, and with Arias herself over 18 days of testimony. Witnesses were intimidated and threatened by an ever-growing audience that waited in line each day to get a seat in the courtroom or watched online.

Although both sides of the case had their followers, the trial-watcher public overwhelmingly held Martinez in high esteem and turned Nurmi into a villain. As the trial progressed, it was Arias who tried to remove Nurmi from her defense team, again without success.

Arias was found guilty of first-degree murder in May 2013, but the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision on whether to sentence her to death. The case went back to court before a new jury in late 2014. After an equally contentious trial in which Martinez was frequently on the ropes, the second jury also reached impasse when a single juror refused to sentence Arias to death. The juror was immediately outed in social media and threatened by angry trial watchers. Arias was sentenced to life in prison.

Nurmi sat down to write his book, which he called Trapped with Ms. Arias, and he published it himself in November 2015.

Complaints filed against prosecutor in Jodi Arias case

Meanwhile, Martinez was writing his own book, Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars, which came out earlier this year, published by a Manhattan publisher.

Arias has not yet completed the appeal of her conviction and life sentence. The fact that attorneys on both sides of the bench have written books about a case still under appeal is unprecedented.

Complaints were also filed with the Bar against Martinez for his book, but the probable cause committee of the Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to charge Martinez on that account.

In early October, however, the Supreme Court's Attorney Discipline Probable Cause Committee accused Martinez of engaging in unprofessional conduct. It came after Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, an association of criminal defense attorneys, filed a 27-page charge detailing Martinez's actions in 11 murder cases — including the Arias case — going back a decade. The charges were vetted by the Bar, and then passed to the committee.

Martinez was offered a consent agreement that would put him on probation for a year, but he turned it down, opting instead to stand trial before the presiding disciplinary judge. That hearing has not yet been scheduled.