e-Lessons Learned

The next time that you get pulled over for driving under the influence, if the police officer tells you that it’s okay for you to pee on the side of the road, you might want to think twice. Someone else might be watching you, especially if there are other police officer with a password granting them access to the video of your… umm… traffic violation. Furthermore, according to the recent decision in State v. Riley, the officers doing so aren’t committing a crime, even though they might be violating their department’s internal policy.

State v. Riley deals with the scope of New Jersey’s computer crime law. According to this law, if someone purposefully accesses computerized data without authorization or in excess of authorization, that person has committed a third degree crime. That seems pretty serious, but what exactly does it have to do with peeing on the side of the road?

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When a police department loses its own videotape of the arrest of a citizen, and the evidence that was on that tape is a key issue in the case, the police department will face very serious sanctions that could be dispositive on the issue. In this civil litigation in which the key issue was whether excessive force was used during the arrest, the lost videotape would have showed the arrest and resolved the key issue in dispute. After weighing several factors, the Court imposed a dispositive sanction in which it designated that the police did use excessive force in the arrest.

Walter Peschel was arrested after a rather odd series of events. While tending the lawn at an apartment complex he owned, Peschel, a doctor, was asked to assist a tenant who sat in her car nearly unconscious from a prescription drug overdose, armed with a gun, and threatening to kill herself. Continue reading »

Lawson IV is a recent installment in the court’s attempt to clean up one client’s extremely bad behavior.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Lawson debacle, the facts were set forth in Lawson v. Sun Microsystems, Inc., 2009 WL 5842136 (S.D. Ind. Oct. 16, 2009) (“Lawson I”­) and again reiterated in Lawson IV. In the course of an ongoing suit, Defendants produced a hard drive that contained both privileged and non-privileged materials to the Plaintiff. The Defendants included a letter accompanying the hard drive that indicated there were privileged materials that were password-protected.

In order to prepare for depositions, Plaintiff’s counsel put the Plaintiff in charge of organizing all of the material on the hard drive. Despite the letter, the Plaintiff accessed the documents. He promptly notified his attorney in an email titled “Password protected files – Unlocked!” and again referred to “unlocked documents” in another email. Plaintiff’s counsel moved to be released from representing him, but the damage was already done. The Defendants moved for sanctions, and the Plaintiff and two of his attorneys were ordered to pay over $50,000. Continue reading »