State v. Jones

[Editor’s Note: The excerpt in Connecting Ethics and Practice: A Lawyer’s Guide to Professional Responsibility, Lewinbuk, 3rd Ed., incorrectly cites to 442 A.2d 939.] Richard Sperandeo was both a state prosecutor and a partner in a private law firm (the firm). Through the firm, Sperandeo had once represented five-year-old Reginald Jones (defendant) in a civil lawsuit for personal injuries from a car accident. The firm obtained Jones’s medical records during that lawsuit. Twelve years later, Jones’s father spoke to another partner at the firm, Harold Donegan, about a vehicle property-damage claim. Shortly thereafter, 17-year-old Jones was charged with murder by the state’s attorney’s office where Sperandeo worked. Jones’s defense to the murder charge was that he had a mental defect or disease. Jones moved to have Sperandeo and all prosecutors in that state’s attorney’s office disqualified from prosecuting the murder charge. In response to the motion, Donegan terminated his representation of Jones’s father, and Sperandeo swore he had not (1) looked at the firm’s files for Jones’s civil case since it closed, (2) looked at Jones’s file in the state attorney’s office, or (3) had any involvement in Jones’s murder prosecution. The trial court ruled that neither Sperandeo nor the other prosecutors had an actual conflict of interest that required disqualification. Even so, the court ordered Sperandeo to avoid contact with Jones’s murder case. Jones appealed.