sustaining professional constraints on disclosure if disclosure is incompatible with professional function and sanction is limited to the professional role or relationship
How later courts described this case
- sustaining professional constraints on disclosure if disclosure is incompatible with professional function and sanction is limited to the professional role or relationship
- professional disciplinary rule survived the accused’s constitutional challenge, because this court narrowly interpreted it so as to limit its coverage, in the words of Article I, section 8, to a prosecutor’s “abuse” of the “right to speak, write, or print freely on any subject whatever”
- Disciplinary Board erred in basing rule violation concerning prosecutor’s extrajudicial state- ments on particular events not charged in complaint; only factual event described in complaint provided basis to ana- lyze alleged rule violation
- regulation of speech is unconstitutional unless it falls within “a historically established exception” that the framers did not intend to abandon upon adoption of the constitution
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
ROBERTS, J.,
dissenting.
I write separately to dissent because I believe the majority opinion will result in undesirable consequences.
The majority, in requiring that a lawyer must act “with indifference” before violating DR 7-107(B)(5) and (6), has gone too far in my opinion in weighing free speech against a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Under the majority opinion only the most blatant behavior on the part of prosecutors will require disciplinary action.
*137 A prosecutor has, by the very nature of the job, a responsibility to protect the integrity of trials. Therefore, a test that hinges on whether the prosecutor “knows or is bound to know” that his acts “pose a serious and imminent threat to the process” protects both the prosecutor’s freedom of speech and defendants’ right to a fair trial.
I respectfully dissent. I join in the separate dissenting opinion of Campbell, J.
Campbell, J., concurs with this dissenting opinion.