WTF Big Brother gone wild!

Okay, we believe that this site has made it clear that far too often police officers in this state have trampled on the rights of innocent citizens. We find this practice abhorrent.

Now we have a case of a police officer whose rights are being trampled and it just doesn’t sit right with us.

After reading the article below, we believe you will come to the same conclusion – something ain’t right here.

Computer Containing Attorney-Client E-Mails Is Fair Game for Police Probe, Judge Rules

By: Henry Gottlieb — Friday, June 19th, 2009 ‘The New Jersey Law Journal’ / Newark, NJ

When a plaintiff’s computer that contained e-mail exchanges with his lawyer ended up in t he defendant’s hands, the lawyer figured he could get the federal judge in the case to order the machine’s return.

But the judge said no, in a dispute that adds a weird chapter to the annals of lawyering in the age of e-mails, blogs and online chat rooms.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler in Newark, N.J., denied a request for a temporary restraining order that would have required the Hackensack Police Department to return Officer Anthony Ferraioli’s home computer that it obtained during an internal affairs investigation.

The department says it has evidence that someone using the computer posed as a Hackensack police lieutenant in a posting on an nj.com forum. Ferraioli says he was threatened with firing if he didn’t surrender the machine and its hard drives, and he did so on June 11.

The incident occurred nine days after Ferraioli and a fellow officer filed a federal civil rights suit claiming they were demoted to walking beats because they voted against the police chief’s preferred candidate for a police union delegate position in 2008.

Their lawyers, Ty Hyderally of Montclair, N.J., and John Zidziunas of Jersey City, N.J., argued for the return of the computer lest the department peek at the two months of lawyer-client e-mails exchanged before and after the filing of the complaint in Ferraioli v. City of Hackensack Police Dept., 09-2663.

Chesler declined to get into the middle of the internal affairs probe. He noted that the computer wasn’t seized — Ferraioli had surrendered it — and that there was insufficient showing of a likelihood of irreparable injury.

Under state attorney general guidelines, police departments can seize an officer’s personal property as evidence in an investigation of wrongdoing.

According to Hyderally and defense lawyer Richard Malagiere of Hackensack, Chesler determined he didn’t have jurisdiction over the internal affairs investigation and that if the plaintiff thoug ht the probe was being handled improperly, he could seek relief from the state attorney general’s office.

If the department did obtain privileged e-mails or used the computer to violate Ferraioli’s rights, the remedy would be a damages suit, not a temporary restraining order, is how the lawyers sum up Chesler’s ruling.

Malagiere says the Hackensack Police Department has no interest in the attorney-client correspondence, only in what it wants to know for the internal affairs investigation.

But Hyderally says he is concerned about having such data in the hands of an adverse party and he says he might amend his civil rights complaint to add the taking of the computer. He also says he might ask Chesler to reconsider.

In the meantime, he says he is preparing a letter to the police department warning against probing too far into the computer’s hard drive.

Co-counsel Zidziunas says he believes his client’s Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches was violated and that the internal investigation was a ruse. “They are using this administrative investigation as a pretext,” he says.

According to pleadings in the dispute, the department has evidence that the computer was the source of a comment on nj.com signed “IA Salcedo.” Lt. Thomas Salcedo is an officer in the department with responsibilities for internal affairs.

A supervisor summoned Ferraioli to headquarters on June 11 and confronted him with copies of his bank statements, a Verizon bill and a print out of the nj.com comment. The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office subpoenaed records from America Online that linked the posting to Ferraioli’s computer.

The pleadings do not give the text or the subject of the May 7 posting on nj.com, which has forums that people in more than 100 New Jersey towns can use to vent about local politics and community affairs.

Like many sites of its kind, the Hackensack forum is full of salty comments for and against local politicians and officials by a small group of regular participants. If there was a posting signed by “IA Salcedo” on that site in May it was no longer there on Wednesday.

Asked whether Ferraioli sent the “IA Salcedo” message, Hyderally says, “I believe the answer is ‘no’ but I don’t know for certain because it wasn’t the focus of our pleadings.”

“I know if I had some other attorneys’ computer that had communications with an attorney I would turn it over,” he says.

As for the department looking at the attorney-client material on the computer, Malagiere says, “to the extent that any public entity under color of law violates anyone’s constitutional rights, they are making themselves amenable to a civil rights suit.”

He says the police department has no interest in the attorney-client correspondence, only in what it wants to know for its internal affairs investigation.

As for using a superior officer’s name as a signoff on an Internet forum, Malagiere says, “If you were going to wake up and say, ‘how do I put my job at risk today,’ that’s got to be one of the top things.”
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“It boils down to a common sense conversation,” he says. “Forget about all the technical legalities and all the intellectual discourse about it. Why would you do it? And I don’t think we’re going to get an answer because people are incomprehensible.”

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