Legal Ethics

DA Brandishes Shotgun In Facebook Picture Captioned, 'You Should Take The Plea'

Maybe we shouldn't condemn this picture as much as ask if it casts light on deeper issues.

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Some people will characterize this as a bone-headed lapse in professional judgment. And they’re not wrong. When Allegheny County ADA Julie Jones posed with a shotgun — tagged evidence in an ongoing investigation — it was hardly a professional highlight. When that picture found its way onto Facebook, tagged with an implied threat, it got so much worse.

But hey, it’s just a little innocent humor. A little innocent humor about the violence inherent in the system.

As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

It appears to have been posted at 6:47 p.m. Thursday on the Facebook page of Officer Garrett Bickmore.

In the picture, he is in uniform and holding a Colt AR-15 assault-style rifle, with what appears to be an evidence tag hanging from it; assistant district attorney Julie Jones has on a skirt suit and is holding a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, also with a tag.

The guns were evidence in a case that the two had worked on together, the Allegheny County district attorney’s office confirmed Friday.

That nonjury trial — in which Ms. Jones was the prosecutor and Officer Bickmore was a lead investigator in the case — concluded Thursday with Michael Jetter, 34, of Highland Park, pleading guilty to gun and drug violations. He was sentenced to three years of probation.

I guess Jetter decided to heed their advice.

Now the charitable view of this picture is that the weight of the physical evidence — specifically these guns — left the defendant no choice but to plead. That’s the kind of sanitized horse hockey excuse they’ll ultimately offer. In reality, they posed with these guns just to look cool and in the process made a very real representation of what’s always implied in plea negotiations. The practice of overcharging to leverage the coercive violence of the state to force defendants into a bum plea deal isn’t new. Nor is the news that prosecutors bank on underfunded public defenders forced to resort to a “meet ’em and plead ’em” approach just to stay above water. But this image lays bare the pervasiveness of a culture of flippancy when an implied threat is leveled as innocent fun. Plea deals that can send people away to live in cages for years on end are fodder for LOLZ.

In the end, focusing the media attention solely on ADA Jones is unfair. Sure this isn’t the most professional decision of her career, but blowing this episode off as a lapse in judgment on the part of a young attorney is like apologizing for getting caught. It’s a cop out to condemn something like this once it bubbles its way out of the water cooler jokes at the office and into social media. Authorities are trying to explain away how this ended up on social media when we should really hold them accountable for engendering the kind of culture that thinks this could possibly be funny.

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Officer, assistant DA posed on Facebook with gun evidence [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

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