The Short Names

Just when I thought many of the issues lawyers deal with through the use of social media were overblown and could be easily addressed by common sense, someone comes along to prove me wrong:  the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office.

As defense lawyer Paul Kennedy notes, the Montgomery County DA’s office has decided to tweet the name of everyone arrested for a DUI. 

This is just a bad idea all the way around.  As Paul notes, people are wrongly arrested all the time, and there is damage that can be done just by noting the fact of someone’s arrest.  To me it doesn’t seem like there’s any good justification for publicizing the names of people arrested for certain types of crimes (I suppose it could serve some deterrent value…).

The DA’s office may come back and say that these are public facts and newspapers may publish the names of arrestees all the time.  But just because facts are publicly known and made available by the media, doesn’t mean the prosecutor has to actively publicize these facts.

I wonder if there are any ethical issues lurking around here? 

Am I off-base on this one?  I’m not a criminal lawyer so I may well be, but it just doesn’t pass the gut-check test for me. 

I guess we may want to look at the bright side.  Tweeting the names of arrestees probably makes it much easier for lawyer-marketers to reach out (even via Twitter) to the people who have been arrested.  (kidding)