RSS FeedCourt officer ordered to apologize
In the latest developments of this bizarre case in Maricopa County, Arizona, Judge Gary Donohue has ruled that detention officer Adam Stoddard acted inappropriately when he removed and photocopied a document from the file of defence attorney Joanne Cuccia. Judge Donohue has ordered Stoddard to apologize, however Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has responded that such an apology is unlikely to happen.
The case began when, during a sentencing hearing, the defendant alerted his attorney to the fact that court officers had removed a document from her file, behind her back while she was making arguments.
Bailiffs behaving badly: Detention Officer Adam Stoddard (officer on the right)
Previously, Stoddard had argued that he was justified in searching the file and removing the document because certain keywords had made him suspicious. It has been revealed that those keywords were “going to”, “steal”, and “money”.
In his ruling, Judge Donohue held that Stoddard had no reasonable justification for believing a crime was taking place. He found:
At issue was also the effect that Stoddard’s argument had on the reputation of defence attorney Cuccia. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had issued multiple public statements in which they claimed to have been on “high alert” because of two incidents where defence attorneys had helped smuggle drugs and other items to their defendant – a member of the Mexican Mafia. Since Cuccia’s defendant was also a documented member of the same organization, Stoddard felt he needed to be on “high alert”.
However, absolutely no evidence has been presented that Cuccia – a ten year member in good standing with the Arizona state bar – has ever committed or been associated with any such wrongdoing. Cuccia was therefore concerned that her professional reputation would be unduly tarnished; she felt she was herself being accused of a crime.
In his ruling, Judge Donohue agreed. He found false suspicion had been cast on Cuccia, and he framed this as the central issue. “This case is not about disobeying a court order. It is about protecting a defence attorney from misbehaviour and harassment by another officer of the court.”
As a result, he ordered that Stoddard would be required to hold a press conference where he would publicly apologize to Cuccia. The press conference is required to take place before Dec. 1, and must contain a “sincere verbal and written apology for invading her defence file and for the damage that his conduct may have caused to her professional reputation.”
The ruling threatens jail time if Stoddard does not apologize, or if Cuccia determines that Stoddard’s apology is insufficient.
Sheriff responds defiantly
Yesterday, however, Maripoca County Sheriff Joe Arpaio sounded defiant, stating that he “stands behind” his officer.
“Superior Court judges do not order my officers to hold press conferences. I decide who holds press conferences and when they are held.”
Whether this issue will be put to rest therefore remains to be seen. Sheriff Arpaio’s statement suggests Stoddard may defy Judge Donohue’s order. As for the original defendant, Antonio Lozano, his sentencing hearing has been pushed back to Dec. 14, and he is now represented by new counsel.
Heat City article on ruling
Original video of Stoddard
Dr. Sarita Verma at the Health Law Conference
First post in a series on the First Annual Interprofessional Health Law Conference.
Dr. Sarita Verma, Deputy Dean of Graduate Postgraduate education at UofT Medicine, is a family physician who originally trained as a lawyer at UofO.
She quickly polled the audience and found about half of the attendees were law students, half medical students, with some nursing, public health, and other graduate students.
The Tension Pentagon
Dr. Verma briefly discussed some of the many areas of health law where medicine and law interact. She noted that mental health was one of the growing areas of health law.
She then presented a new model she had developed to evaluate the context of health law issues. This tension pentagon was comprised of 5 different stakeholders, whose interests often conflicted and interacted with each other.
At the center of the pentagon was the public, which is important in creating a publicly-centered health system.
The 5 influencers were:
- ethics
- practitioners
- funders
- industry
- legal system
First Annual Interprofessional Health Law Conference
The First Annual Interprofessional Health Law Conference is being held this morning at UofT law. The session is being broadcasted live to viewers across the world.
Notes from the session can be found below.
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Dr. Sarita Verma at the Health Law Conference
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The Values and Ethics of Euthanasia
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The Harm Reduction Controversy & Injection Sites
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Law 101 for Health Care Professionals
The complete series will be uploaded over the next few days.
The Hidden Dangers of Document Metadata
To follow up on Omar Ha-Redeye’s post about the ethical challenges of practicing law with new information technology, I received the following interesting excerpt from the CBA newsletter in my email inbox:
Metadata: A cautionary tale
Two lawyers are working together on a contract for a client, using a similar contract prepared for another client and fine-tuning the wording to suit this situation. They have used technology to full advantage, saving the original contract under a new name, tracking changes, and writing comments to each other as the drafts evolved. When the draft is ready, one of the lawyers switches from “Final Showing Mark-up” to “Final”, and sends the document to the client by e-mail.
Imagine their distress when the lawyers find out that the client was able to access the document metadata to learn the name of the other client, read the original document prepared for that client, and see all the changes and comments made.
Not only is this embarrassing, it is a breach of professional ethics.
It’s important to understand that most word processing and other “office suite” programs automatically attach metadata to documents, often without the lawyer’s knowledge. Usually this “automatic” metadata would contain things like: the author’s name; the date the document was last saved; and how much time was spent working on the document.
If the lawyer makes use of commenting or revision tracking features, as described in “cautionary tale” above, the metadata would be rich with all sorts of juicy – and confidential – details that could come to the attention of a client, adversary, or third party. For example, anyone with tech savviness could discover the names of reviewers, the number of revisions, and might even be able to see the hidden reviewers’ comments that do not appear on printed copies of the document.
The CBA’s new “Guidelines for Practicing Ethically with New Information Technologies” recommend that lawyers clear the metadata of their documents before sending them out to the client or adversary, just in case:
Lawyers have an ethical obligation, when transmitting documents electronically, to exercise reasonable care to ensure that clients’ confidential information is not disclosed in the
metadata.There are practices that minimize the creation of metadata, as well as ways to remove the
hidden data before distribution or publication so it is not accessible to people for whom it is
not intended. Before removing metadata, lawyers should ensure that there are no legal
requirements to retain the metadata (e.g. discovery obligations).
The new guidelines provide instructions on how to eliminate hidden data, which can be found in Appendix 2 of the document.
First-Year Law Student Teaches Ethics to Chinese Delegation
(reproduced with the author’s permission)
First-Year Law Student Teaches Ethics to Chinese Delegation
TORONTO – Omar Ha-Redeye, a law student at the University of Western Ontario, presented a seminar on ethical behaviour in disasters to a diplomatic delegation on Nov. 9, 2007.
The Chinese dignitaries were from China, and represented the Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND). They were in Canada for one week, on a trip to meet with specialists in disaster management and learn from best practices here.
Mr. Ha-Redeye worked internationally in disaster and emergency management prior to starting law at the University of Western Ontario in September 2007. He shared an ethical model he developed in the review of successes and failures of major environmental and unnatural disasters.
The topics covered included the SARS epidemic in Canada, relief to families of Sept. 11, 2001, and the 2004 Tsunami in South-East Asia.
“In the study of ethics, there is no one single right course of action,” said Mr. Ha-Redeye. “What we try to do is present different ethical approaches, and try to reconcile competing needs in an emergent situation.”
Mr. Ha-Redeye explained that in disasters and emergencies there is little time for extensive ethical analysis, requiring professionals to be at least be familiar with ethical theory. The model he presented could also be used in other fields, or in daily situations in life.
First-year law students study ethics in their Spring semester of law at the University of Western Ontario. Western students begin their first class of ethics on Feb. 13, 2008.
“Although I am familiar with ethical concepts, their application specifically to the field of law is something I look forward to,”said Ha-Redeye.
Discussion around ethical behaviour in the legal profession has increased in recent months following the release of a book by a former Dean of Western Law, Phillip Slayton, entitled Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession.
The training session was held at the Holiday Inn in downtown Toronto, and was hosted by the Foundation for International Training (FIT).
Below: Omar Ha-Redeye offers a session on ethics in disasters to a diplomatic delegation from China (Photo Credit: Omar Ha-Redeye)
Notes
Western Law was featured in the current issue of the CBA National magazine for the legal study of ethics. Western was the first law school to offer a mandatory ethics class in Ontario, and the first to have a mandatory course in the first year.
Ethics is usually more uniformly required in other jurisdictions.
Updates
The Law Society of Upper Canada is debating whether ethics should be a mandatory subject in Ontario.
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