Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Court Rules You Have the Right To Google a Lawyer
An anonymous reader writes "Hollywood crime dramas are infamous for the scene when an
accused is taken to a local police station and permitted a single phone call to
contact a relative or lawyer. While the storyline is myth — there is no limit on the number of phone calls available to an accused or detainee — Michael Geist reports
on a recent Canadian
case establishing a new, real requirement for law enforcement. After a 19-year
old struggled to find a lawyer using the telephone, the court ruled that police
must provide an accused with Internet access in order to exercise their right
to counsel."
The other problem is how much access are you going to give the suspect? Would the police be allowed to monitor everything in case the suspect tries to tamper with evidence or influence people?
The question is an interesting one - police are (in most countries, at least, including Canada afaik) not allowed to monitor communications between a lawyer and their client, with that "no monitoring" also extending to their initial attempts to locate/contact their lawyer. Presumably if the police allow the accused to log into their gmail account to email a lawyer, they would not be allowed to retain those login details for future evidence searches. Of course, if the internet access is used purely to find a directory of lawyers and go down them one by one to find one willing/able to represent the accused, that is another thing. But if a police officer offered me a PC and said "just login to your email account here, find a lawyer and send them an email asking for help", I am not sure if I would laugh or cry at such a bad attempt at password phishing.
I'm not seeing any particular reason that the time spent searching could not be supervised; no privileged information is going to be shared with the attorney before contacting them. Electronic supervision would be the obvious choice, but frankly I would rather see an officer putting physical eyes on suspects: it gives a more immediate means of challenging questionable use and it avoids any illusion on the suspect's part that they are not being watched.
That said, the access itself should probably be fairly open. The detained would be well-advised to do at least minimal research on whoever will potentially represent them in court, and an overly broad block on access might restrict them from pertinent information.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The right to freely choose a lawyer might be affected by such a pre-selection by the police.
bickerdyke
According to Iowa Code 804.20, the police "shall" monitor any phone calls made. The exact text is:
Such person shall be permitted to make a reasonable number of telephone calls as may be required to secure an attorney. If a call is made, it shall be made in the presence of the person having custody of the one arrested or restrained. (Source: https://coolice.legis.iowa.gov/Cool-ICE/default.asp?category=billinfo&service=IowaCode&ga=83&input=804.20)
I can't speak to legislative intent, but I wouldn't be surprised if harassment of victims or witness tampering were at least part of that conversation. If your attorney comes down to the police station, then you can chat as privately as your attorney wants. In practice, the police monitor and log all calls made such that they can later prove that they gave the suspect a reasonable opportunity to contact someone. (Failure to do so can have pretty severe legal ramifications including excluding evidence.)
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
While that certainly sounds nice, it has no real meaning to me.
One of my teachers once told me: (translated)"Measuring is knowing". Followed by a grave "But only when you know what you are measuring".
In my case (and probably lots of people with me) I would have no idea what to use as yardstick to measure those lawyers against.
To pick a good lawyer probably goes the same as with picking a good plumber: Only after he did his work you will know. And in case of lawyers that method can cost you dearly, both in money (to be payed to the lawyer and others) as in freedom (because of being put into jail because of this lawyers bad job).
In other words: for most people who do not deal with the Law on a regular basis being able to pick a lawyer is nothing more than a farce.
But than again, I regard the judicial process as a kind of random thing: depending on quite a few factors which have very little to do with the Law itself you could win or lose a case.