Email, Twitter, Faceboook - Not the Lock and Key of White Collar Crime

White collar crime can be a difficult area of defense for general criminal attorneys -- this is one of the reasons that you'll find specialists in the area. Much of the evidence in white collar crime relates to intent or knowledge, which can only be proven with recordings of conversations, letters, and witness accounts of relayed information. Increasingly, electronic methods of recording information are subject to scrutiny in criminal trials; these might include emails, or even ephemeral methods of relaying information such as Twitter and Facebook. However, it seems that prosecutors are not set to have the success that they expected by seizing email records; a recent case explains the precedent win for criminal attorneys.

The Bear Sterns Verdict and Impact

Two hedge fund managers at Bear Sterns were recently found not guilty on all of their fraud charges. The prosecution case was that they had lied to investors, informing them that the prospects seemed optimistic in order to prevent them from pulling out their funding, when in reality they were close to spent.

Obviously, some key aspects of the case to be argued over by criminal attorneys would include whether the defendants were in fact optimistic about the fund's future or not; and whether their comments to investors were an accurate representation of their feelings. Without the widespread ability to record a person's thoughts at every second of the day, prosecutors are turning to expressions of thought in forms like email to help prove their case.

Is Email the Lock and Key of White Collar Crime?

This is where a jury of a person's peers plays such a key role in determining the apportionment of justice. Some of the defendant's emails may have indicated some level of doubt about the viability of the hedge fund. However, the jurors understood that not every email represents the entire truth, nor does it necessarily equate to a balanced and measured view of reality or a cross-section of the defendant's brain at any particular time.

Expert white collar criminal attorneys will be paying a lot of attention to this case, and using the finding for their own defendants in the future.