NPR: When Prisoners Email Their Lawyers, It’s Often Not Confidential

NPR: When Prisoners Email Their Lawyers, It’s Often Not Confidential by Joel Rose:

At least once a week, federal defender Deirdre von Dornum travels across Brooklyn to meet with her incarcerated clients. The round trip takes three hours, on a good day.

First von Dornum rides the subway. Then she walks half a mile to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a pair of nondescript high-rise buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront. At this point, she still has to wait — sometimes for hours — for guards to bring her client down from his cell.

“It’s time that I’m not able to spend on other portions of the case,” says von Dornum. “I have to use the hours to travel back and forth to the jail.”

But as cumbersome as this is, defense lawyers say it’s often the only way to talk with their clients that is both timely and confidential. Phone conversations with attorneys are private, but there aren’t always enough phones. The post office is too slow. Many federal inmates have access to email. But defense attorneys say they don’t trust it, because prosecutors have used those emails as evidence in court. Now defense lawyers and elected officials want to change that.