The Supreme Court announced that it has granted review in two more cases. The first, an ethics matter that could arise only in our current electronic age, comes to the Court on a petition for review. The second, a criminal appeal, is before the Court on leave to appeal.
The ethics case is In re Opinion No. 735 of the Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics. The question presented there, as phrased by the Supreme Court Clerk’s office, is “May an attorney, consistent with the Rules of Professional Conduct, purchase from an internet search engine company a keyword that is a competitor lawyer’s name in order to display the purchasing lawyer’s own website in the search results when a person searches for the competitor lawyer by name?” The Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics found no ethics violation.
State v. Sanchez, the criminal case in which the Court granted leave to appeal, presents this question: “Is the testimony of defendant’s parole officer, who identified defendant from a photograph allegedly linking him to criminal activity, admissible at trial?” A Law Division judge suppressed the parole officer’s testimony, but a two-judge panel of the Appellate Division granted the State leave to appeal and, in an unpublished opinion, reversed the Law Division’s ruling.