The question in the title of this post is the headline of this notable new Vice article. I recommend the lengthy piece in full, and I suspect more than a few readers might have more than a few thoughts on this important modern-day topic. Here are just a few excerpts from a piece with lots of thought-provoking elements:
Public defenders had blogged about their work as long as a decade ago, and tweeting about arraignments wasn’t new, but [Scott] 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. The optics of white public defenders gaining likes or retweets on stories of Black and brown suffering has also been called into question. As advocacy efforts morph from live-tweets to slick video productions, and gain traction with a public increasingly likely to support justice reform, the question has become: who should be telling the story?...
They are a powerful voice in the justice system, but one fear for public defenders and defendants alike is that the judge, prosecutor, or parole officer will retaliate against tweets that are critical of their actions, said Qiana Johnson, executive director of Life After Release, a program that assists people with re-entry. Even those who have already served a sentence are often constrained from speaking out by probation or parole conditions. “Their advocacy could cost them,” she said....
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.
Many on PD Twitter have also been called out for “trading on the suffering of Black and brown people,” said [Nicole] Smith Futrell, cautioning that “just because you’re a public defender representing someone who’s experienced [the system,] it doesn’t mean that you’ve experienced that thing that you now get to tell.” As defense attorneys push advocacy in new directions and accept media opportunities, they are encountering many of the ethical questions journalists have long wrestled with: does the individual or the larger narrative take precedence? When does “storytelling” become exploitative?...
Brendon Woods, the chief defender in Oakland’s Alameda County Public Defender’s Office, has been in the field since the late 90s when there were a few shared desktop computers available for public defenders to use. He sees plenty of law enforcement outfits on Twitter and said the voices of public defenders have been game-changing. They have power, he said, but that power must be used with care. “Our clients, they’ve been dehumanized by the system so much, you don’t need to have it happen from people who are tweeting or posting stories on Facebook,” he said, “and without any thought or strategy being put into them or why they're doing it.”
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