Jul 18, 2009
When Not to Blog (Prosecutors Edition)
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By: Luke Gilman | Other Posts by Luke Gilman Go to Comments | One Comment |
The legal profession has more than its share of land mines for would-be bloggers. Houston Criminal Lawyer and Fearless Blogger Mark Bennett points out one of the many differences between himself and prosecutors – he can speak his mind with relative impunity; prosecutors are officers and representatives of the State. Even when they speak for themselves they implicate our collective coercive power over the person. So when someone pulls the veil back on the sausage factory, it’s well, unseemly. Consider a excerpt from “the Sassy Court”:
Today, [Chief Man] was laughing at me because I was livid that he wanted to give my pervert a deferred. I told him I didn’t care what he did as long as it counted toward the guy registering as a sex offender.
At one point he was sitting with his head on the desk. Then he tried to explain to me that they give deferreds to sex offenders all the time in felony. I don’t care what they do in felony!!! I want my guy to have to register as a sex offender!
It was not quite a surprise to find that the blog had gone dark today. In any other context – covering politics, business – those kinds of comments would be perfectly acceptable and purely entertaining. One of the issues of working for the government is that it’s not always easy to tell where ones own dominion ends and where the government’s begins. For a public employee I’m not sure a public, even presumptively anonymous blog, of the kind those of us in private practice take for granted, can ever be appropriate. There are consequences to blogging. Not all of them are good.
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It’s worth pointing out that there are reasons for lawyers to blog as well.