Lawyers convicted of child pornography charges will automatically be disbarred and prohibited from practicing law in California, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

Deciding the fate of an Orange County lawyer whose license was suspended after he pleaded guilty to having child porn at his home, the court said that keeping sexual images of children constitutes an act of moral turpitude that makes an attorney unfit for the legal profession.

"The knowing possession of child pornography is a serious breach of the duties of respect and care that all adults owe to all children, and it shows such a flagrant disrespect for the law and for societal norms, that continuation of a convicted attorney's State Bar membership would be likely to undermine public confidence in and respect for the legal profession," Justice Carol Corrigan wrote in the opinion.

The unanimous ruling came in the case of Gary Douglass Grant, a former Army lawyer at the Los Alamitos Army Reserve Base in Orange County. Grant pleaded guilty to one count of knowingly possessing child pornography in 2009 after sheriff's deputies found videos and photographs of underage girls mixed in with a large adult pornography collection on his computers and data discs.