Should Public Defenders Be Tweeting?
By Janet Manley
Vice.com
February 18, 2021
Excerpt:
Once in the shadows, public defenders have found their voice on Twitter. But criminal justice reform advocates and formerly incarcerated people question whether they’re the ones to tell these stories.
The first thing Scott Hechinger would do when meeting new clients at arraignments as a public defender was rap his knuckles on the metal mesh separating attorneys from those arrested and put in holding cells. “It’s hard to see through it,” he recalled. “I would say, ‘I hate this. We are on the same side of things. And my goal today is to get you out.”
At the time, Hechinger didn’t see attorneys talking openly about what they experienced as a public defender or the high volume of cases many tackled early in their careers. So in 2017, he began to tweet about the people caught up in the system, detailing what he saw in court.
While Hechinger typifies one faction of Public Defender Twitter (or PD Twitter, as it’s known), he’s just one of many who’ve gained followings by posting anecdotes from the gallery as Twitter threads. Public defenders had blogged about their work as long as a decade ago, and tweeting about arraignments wasn’t new, but Hechinger and others in New York’s PD scene are responsible for popularizing the trend. As it’s grown, however, criminal justice reform advocates and formerly incarcerated people have started to argue that these posts can put clients at risk of retaliation from judges and prosecutors, violate their privacy, and present ethical quandaries for public defenders talking so openly about their work on Twitter.
There have been complaints filed against defense attorneys over their use of social media in recent years, though those are not public, said Ellen C. Yaroshefsky, the Howard Lichtenstein Distinguished Professor of Legal Ethics at Hofstra University, who studies ethics in law. Prior to 2014, a Virginia attorney was disciplined for blogging about the cases he had won as a defense attorney, an act that constituted self-advertising, the state bar found, according to the 2013 law letter written by Nicole Hyland as part of an ethics committee. An Illinois public defender was fired from her job and suspended by the bar for 60 days after posting client details in 2007 and 2008 on Facebook, including a picture of her client’s leopard-skin underwear—evidence in a trial. Others have been disciplined for disparaging clients or judges. In March 2018, the American Bar Association issued a formal opinion limiting the ability of attorneys to blog or comment publicly about their cases.
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