Fordham Law Professor Bruce Green, director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, weighs in on the “duty of confidentiality” after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Thursday, Jan. 2, that her office has a conflict of interest in the criminal investigation of multiple correction officers who allegedly beat inmate Robert L. Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility.
Bruce A. Green, a former assistant U.S. attorney and chair of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham Law School, said that any prior civil lawsuits involving the 13 correction officers in the Marcy incident may not have presented a conflict of interest for the attorney general’s office unless it had represented them individually. In many instances, those cases are filed against the state of New York.
“It’s a big difference between defending the state or the Department of Corrections and defending the individuals as clients,” Green said. “Because if you’re defending (the correction officers as) individuals and they tell you something, and they’re your individual clients, you owe them confidentiality. You can’t later take a case … and use their confidential information against them.”
But Green said that if the attorney general’s office has represented the state in those civil cases, and defending the conduct of individual officers in the context of defending any agency or the state, “you don’t owe them a duty of confidentiality. … If they tell you stuff, you can use it against them (later), because they’re not the client.”
Read “N.Y. attorney general recuses office from Robert Brooks’ beating death case” in Times Union.