Disciplinary referrals are issued against lawyers who break the court rules.
This NEVER actually happens. In the case against Luigi Mangione, the DA illegally stole Luigi’s medical records, read through all of them, and then said “Oops” when they clearly weren’t allowed to do that. It wasn’t an accident.
Nothing happened.
You’re reading about theoretical rules. Lawyers primarily get referred because they steal from clients. Violating judicial orders or procedural rules does not usually result in anything except in an extraordinary situation. You’re implying an orderly fair process, and it’s not true. Police lie all the damn time and the rules that traditionally made it much harder for a defendant to get fucked have been extraordinarily eroded. I suppose it doesn’t matter most of the time for the public. Most of the public is far too oblivious to get how fucked this is; the time when Constitutional rights really truly matter are after arrest and most people will not know what that’s like. They just see occasional headlines for cases being tossed on technical grounds and think “this is unfair! why are criminals going free” and don’t realize how completely fucked the system is for defendants.