Clerk fired for helping wrongfully accused man

[Deleted]

Lawyer peeps, should the clerk have been fired?

www.businessinsider.com/sharon-snyder-fired-after-helping-robert-nelson-2013-7

A Kansas judge fired a 34-year employee of the court — nine months before her retirement — after she showed a wrongly convicted man a publicly available court document on DNA testing, the Associated Press reported.

Robert Nelson, 49, used the information from Sharon Snyder, 70, to prove he didn't commit a rape that would have kept him behind bars for 70 years.

Nelson filed a motion in 2009 requesting DNA testing not available when the court convicted him 25 years earlier in 1983. Jackson County judge David Byrn, the same one who put him in prison, twice denied his request.

At that point, Nelson's sister got in touch with Snyder. The great-grandmother provided Nelson with a case where a judge sustained a motion for retrospective DNA testing.

With this new information Nelson tried a third time, and Byrn granted his motion and appointed a lawyer from the Innocence Project to represent him. Last month, the Kansas City police department's crime lab excluded Nelson as a source for the evidence found in the case.

Nelson calls Snyder his "angel," the AP reported.

In his letter dismissing Snyder, the judge said she'd crossed a line by giving advice to a defendant.

“The document you chose was, in effect, your recommendation for a Motion for DNA testing that would likely be successful in this Division,” according to the letter quoted by the AP. “But it was clearly improper and a violation of Canon Seven … which warns against the risk of offering an opinion or suggested course of action.”


Read more: www.businessinsider.com/sharon-snyder-fired-after-helping-robert-nelson-2013-7#ixzz2c4TUNLr3

[cronewitch]

Yes, she violated a work rule even if for what she considered a good reason.

[tskeeter]

It appears that this clerk did "what was right", but what she did was against the rules.  A rather extreme extension of this action would be to shoot someone dead because the community would be better off without that person.  Might really be the best thing to do, but it's still against the law.

On a more positive note, I think it is unlikely that the clerk has lost her pension.  Most pensions vest within five or ten years of employment.  That this employee was fired nine months before her anticipated retirement date most likely has limited impact on her pension.  If she really felt a need to provide information to a defendant, it appears she could have avoided the situation she created by simply waiting until the day after her retirement.    

[Abby Normal]

I think it says more about the judge than anything else.  Maybe he's the one that needs to be fired.  To deny the request twice (maybe it was procedurally done incorrectly) then to react like this- sounds off.  

[midjd]

Most state's rules are pretty clear about court employees' (in)ability to provide procedural or legal advice. I work under the same restrictions, and it is drilled into you from Day 1 - do not give advice to litigants. So yes, she should have been disciplined.

[shanendoah]

I'll be honest, I am not certain the clerk violated the work rule listed. It would really depend on what the sister said when she contacted Snyder, and if she contacted her as an employee of the court or as a family friend.

If she was contacted as a family friend, and during non-work hours used her knowledge to find the PUBLICLY available court case, she did nothing wrong.
If the sister contacted her as an employee of the court and said "this is our situation, do you know of a court case where this type of retroactive testing was done", she did nothing wrong, because she didn't provide a recommendation, she provided what was asked for.

If asked as a friend to help and she used work resources, she violated the rule.
If asked as an employee of the court, where the request was "do you know anything that could help" or "woe as me, what can we do", then she did provide a recommendation and violated the rule.

I have to wonder, though, if, instead of providing the family with the court case, if the employee had suggested they seek out the Innocence Project themselves, would that have counted as a recommendation?

I also think we really need to work on educating people about their rights and resources available to them. It sounds like this man was trying to file a motion to get the retroactive DNA testing himself, without the aid of a lawyer. If he or his family had known to contact the Innocence Project from the beginning, he could have been exonerated 3-4 years ago, when he first requested the DNA testing.


I do get that court employees are not allowed to give legal advice, even if they know the answer, as they are not lawyers (just like as a medical receptionist, I was not allowed to give a medical opinion, even if I knew that for a stye, you could just go buy some OTC meds), so I get that if she did violate the work rule, this was decision that needed to happen.
In this case, it is true her advice helped exonerate a man, she could just have easily given the family advice that would have led to him losing his ability to appeal or something along those lines. The rule isn't there to keep people from helping, it's there to keep them from hurting someone's case, either inadvertently or maliciously.