A Miami attorney was suspended in 2025 for contempt of court. He died in 2024
Attorneys get suspended or disbarred every month for not properly responding to The Florida Bar. But they’re usually alive.
For the second time in five years, a South Florida lawyer was disciplined after death.
The state Supreme Court suspended South Miami-Dade’s Emelike Nwosuocha for three years on Dec. 11 for not providing an affidavit required by a previous suspension. According to database and social media information, Nwosuocha died at age 64 on July 21, 2024.
A Nov. 1, 2025, Instagram post by one of Nwosuocha’s four children, actress Nia Miranda, said she learned of his death by heart attack six hours before the first day of filming on the AllBlk network streaming series “G.R.I.T.S.”
“My father had not been sick,” Miranda said. “He was still going to the gym. I had scheduled a flight to see him directly after I was done filming the series.”
A similar sequence of events involved Delray Beach attorney Sabrina Spradley, who died Oct. 14, 2019. The lawyer then was suspended in February 2020 and disbarred in December 2020, 14 months after her death.
READ MORE: An attorney got disbarred in 2020 for not answering the Florida Bar. She died in 2019
Both situations involved the responsibilities of a suspended attorney.
The paperwork of punishment
The general language in the documents when the state Supreme Court issues a suspension includes the requirement that a lawyer must “notify his clients, opposing counsel, tribunals, and all state, federal and administrative bars of which he is a member of his suspension, and to provide a sworn affidavit to The Florida Bar within 30 days of the suspension listing the names and addresses of all persons and entities that were furnished a copy of the suspension order.”
After a Miami-Dade civil case filed by Nwosuocha on behalf of a client was dismissed and the defendant was awarded $5,310 in attorney’s fees, the defendant filed a Bar grievance claiming he couldn’t collect that money from Nwosuocha. When Nwosuocha didn’t answer the grievance until after a default judgment against him by the case referee, he got a six-month suspension on Aug. 17, 2023.
That gave Nwosuocha until Sept. 16, 2023, to provide the affidavit. He didn’t do that or pay the attorney’s fees. The Bar filed a petition for contempt on April 17, 2024.
Nwosuocha answered the affidavit part of the petition with “I dropped all my clients and advised them that I was suspended.” As to the money problem, he said he lacked the funds because companies wouldn’t hire him while on suspension.
But that response was filed too late, so Nwosuocha received a one-year suspension for contempt on June 18, 2024. This required another notification affidavit, due July 17, 2024.
Nwosuocha died on July 21, 2024. On Oct. 11, 2024, the Bar sent a letter and email telling Nwosuocha “of his noncompliance with the conditions of his suspension to his record bar mailing address and record bar email address, specifically his failure to submit the sworn affidavit.”
That’s from the Oct. 8, 2025, Bar filing asking the state Supreme Court to find Nwosuocha in contempt again, suspend him for three years, and order him to submit the affidavit before allowing him to reply for reinstatement. Also, the request asked Nwosuocha be fined $1,250 in case costs.
The state Supreme Court did all of the above on Dec. 11, 2025 — 508 days after Nwosuocha’s death.
This story was originally published January 12, 2026 at 5:38 AM.
