Legal Ethics
Lawyer’s Knowledge Used Against Him
Posted Sep 26, 2007, 09:18 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Connecticut lawyer Philip Russell has a lot of expertise in child pornography cases—but it may hurt his defense in a prosecution for destroying evidence.
Prosecutors say Russell should have given the FBI his client's computer containing child pornography instead of destroying it. He is accused of obstructing justice under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which only requires a showing that an investigation was foreseeable rather than pending, ABAJournal.com reported in an earlier post.
Prosecutors argued in a brief filed Monday that Russell had “substantial experience” in such cases and knew that a federal investigation “was foreseeable and likely," the Associated Press reports. They cite other cases in which Russell sought a court order to turn over child porn evidence or actually delivered such evidence to law enforcement.
Russell's lawyer, Robert Casale, argues that relying on his client’s legal actions in past cases could harm the practice of law. "In a democratic society that employs an adversarial system of justice, lawyers must be free to zealously advocate their client's interests without fear of the consequences that their words will someday be used against them personally," he wrote.
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