People always ask the Above the Law editors, “What kinds of people leave such horrible comments on your website?” And we always say, “Regular people, the ones you work with or socialize with.”
Most internet commenters are regular people who, under the Invisibility Cloak of cyberspace, feel free to say whatever disgusting/ridiculous/illogical thing that pops into their heads.
Lest anyone think the phenomenon is unique to our website, please think again. For better or worse, trolling is an inevitable part of online media. Most of the time, it’s best to just ignore it. Once a while, however, anonymous online commenting may signify something larger and more pernicious.
Case in point: our inbox was flooded over the weekend with the emerging scandal of a prosecommenter (yeah, you read that right) in New Orleans. This is what happens when a federal prosecutor takes his case to the interwebs instead of the court. Bad times…
The story started blowing up late last week. This is where things stand, as reported by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog:
Sal Perricone, a veteran prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in New Orleans, was using the handle “Henry L. Mencken1951″ — yes, we love Mencken, but not as cover for someone else — to post nasty comments about one Fred Heebe, the co-owner of a landfill under federal investigation.
Now, this wasn’t a few isolated instances of Perricone trolling. “That guy is lame. He is ugly and fat.”
This guy made 598 comments on NOLA.com over the course of just six months. Holy cow. As we mentioned in Friday’s Non-Sequiturs, Perricone was almost as prolific as BonoboBro. “Unprofessional” is a gentle way to describe the things he said about the case he was working on. For starters:
If Heebe had one firing synapse, he would go speak to Letten’s posse and purge himself of this sordid episode and let them go after the council and public officials. Why prolong this pain… quote
And…
Heebe comes from a long line of corruptors.
The prosecutor made so many comments with information specific to Heebe’s case that the landfill owner became suspicious enough to hire a forensic investigator to figure out what the hell was going on. From Ars Technica:
Heebe hired a former FBI forensic linguist, James R. Fitzgerald, to analyze 598 comments made over the course of 6 months by a commenter using the handle “Henry L. Mencken1951″. Fitzgerald, who also worked on the arrest and prosecution of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, compared the comments made by “Mencken1951″ to the language in a 9-page proceeding filed by three Assistant U.S. Attorneys, including Parricone, against the CEO of Heebe’s company, River Birch Landfill. The language was strikingly similar. Given that Parricone was born in 1951, Heebe singled him out in the court petition. On Thursday afternoon, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten confirmed Perricone had used the “Henry L. Mencken1951″ handle.
“The pleading and the Mencken posts share many similarities, including the use of particular archaic words — e.g. ‘dubiety’ and ‘redoubt’ — as well as distinctive punctuation and frequent use of the rhetorical technique of alliteration,” Heebe’s petition read.
So far, Heebe has sued Perricone for defamation, Perricone has been placed on annual leave, and Perricone is facing a Justice Department investigation. It’s not the first time he’s gotten in trouble. And honestly, it makes me happy to see sh*t hitting the fan for him. Pretty much every level of the New Orleans criminal justice system already has a crummy ethical reputation (anyone remember that whole Katrina thing?), and I’m sure this is exactly what the local suits with big offices want in the news right now.
Besides, it is not new that government lawyers (and judges) are starting to have to be more careful in the ways they handle themselves online, outside of their immediate courtroom duties. Some judges have even come under fire for who they are friends with on Facebook. And Andrew Shirvell, the former Michigan assistant attorney general, torpedoed his career by criticizing the openly gay ex-president of the University of Michigan student body online.
Moreover, ethical questions aside, you never know how anonymous you really are. That might mean someone can actually trace your IP address, or as in this case, simply that someone compare your writing to something published with your name on it.
Either way, Perricone was patently unwise. He deserves whatever he gets.
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
When Anonymous Commenting Goes Real Wrong
By Christopher DanzigMost internet commenters are regular people who, under the Invisibility Cloak of cyberspace, feel free to say whatever disgusting/ridiculous/illogical thing that pops into their heads.
Lest anyone think the phenomenon is unique to our website, please think again. For better or worse, trolling is an inevitable part of online media. Most of the time, it’s best to just ignore it. Once a while, however, anonymous online commenting may signify something larger and more pernicious.
Case in point: our inbox was flooded over the weekend with the emerging scandal of a prosecommenter (yeah, you read that right) in New Orleans. This is what happens when a federal prosecutor takes his case to the interwebs instead of the court. Bad times…
The story started blowing up late last week. This is where things stand, as reported by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog:
Now, this wasn’t a few isolated instances of Perricone trolling. “That guy is lame. He is ugly and fat.”
This guy made 598 comments on NOLA.com over the course of just six months. Holy cow. As we mentioned in Friday’s Non-Sequiturs, Perricone was almost as prolific as BonoboBro. “Unprofessional” is a gentle way to describe the things he said about the case he was working on. For starters:
And…
The prosecutor made so many comments with information specific to Heebe’s case that the landfill owner became suspicious enough to hire a forensic investigator to figure out what the hell was going on. From Ars Technica:
So far, Heebe has sued Perricone for defamation, Perricone has been placed on annual leave, and Perricone is facing a Justice Department investigation. It’s not the first time he’s gotten in trouble. And honestly, it makes me happy to see sh*t hitting the fan for him. Pretty much every level of the New Orleans criminal justice system already has a crummy ethical reputation (anyone remember that whole Katrina thing?), and I’m sure this is exactly what the local suits with big offices want in the news right now.
Besides, it is not new that government lawyers (and judges) are starting to have to be more careful in the ways they handle themselves online, outside of their immediate courtroom duties. Some judges have even come under fire for who they are friends with on Facebook. And Andrew Shirvell, the former Michigan assistant attorney general, torpedoed his career by criticizing the openly gay ex-president of the University of Michigan student body online.
Moreover, ethical questions aside, you never know how anonymous you really are. That might mean someone can actually trace your IP address, or as in this case, simply that someone compare your writing to something published with your name on it.
Either way, Perricone was patently unwise. He deserves whatever he gets.
When a Prosecutor Makes Comments Online About a Case [WSJ Law Blog]
Embattled businessman outs news site commenter as a federal prosecutor [Ars Technica]
Tags: Anonymity, Bad Ideas, Blog Wars, Blogging, blogs, Commenting, Defamation, Fred Heebe, Free Speech, Henry L. Mencken1951, James R. Fitzgerald, Jim Letten, Louisiana, New Orleans, Online anonymity, Prosecutors, Rank Stupidity, River Birch Landfill, Sal Perricone, Technology, U.S. Attorneys Offices