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Indiana’s attorney general has paid more than $190,000 in legal fees for work in relation with the office’s investigation into a doctor who performed an abortion for a 10-year-old girl. The attorney general is now facing professional misconduct charges related to comments he made about the case. IU McKinney Professor Margaret Tarkington talked with Indianapolis television news station WRTV about the attorney general for stories that appeared September 20 and September 22.

The fees paid to the Washington, D.C., law firm Schaerr Jaffe do not include the work being done to defend the attorney general personally in an ethics case filed September 18. Regarding the $190,000 in legal fees, Professor Tarkington questioned the proportion of the about spent in legal fees to the amount the physician was fined. “The real question is, why are we putting all these state resources into getting a $3,000 fine?" Professor Tarkington said in the September 20 story. "It's disproportionate. It comes out as a political stunt or dog-and-pony show so that you can get on Fox News."

The Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission charged the attorney general on September 18 with violating the rules of professional conduct based on comments he gave to an interview on Fox News. The comments concerned the doctor who performed the abortion on the 10-year-old girl from Ohio. In the September 22 story, Professor Tarkington talked about the power prosecutors have to take away life, liberty, and property and in the case of the doctor, to take away her medical license. She said restrictions on what prosecutors can say about a defendant are constitutional. Such restrictions “do not violate free speech because they work together to actually make our justice system fair," she said. "They're part of the mechanism for making sure that the state doesn't deprive you of life, liberty and property without due process of law."

Professor Tarkington is a well-known expert in the area of attorney free speech rights. Her book, Voice of Justice: Reclaiming the First Amendment Rights of Lawyers, was published in 2018. She is a dean’s fellow and co-director of the J.D. Program and Evaluation Assessment at IU McKinney, where she teaches professional responsibility, civil procedure, and federal courts.