Course Name: Intro to Legal Ethics
Instructor: Brent Halbleib
Assignment: Unit 3 Confidentiality and Attorney/Client Privilege
Name: Donna Marie Brown
Date: July 26, 2015
Possible Points: 100

Confidentiality and Attorney- Client Privilege
Donna Marie Brown
Kaplan University

Confidentiality and the Alton Logan Case

“Sometimes trying to make wrongful conviction right, creates an ethical tension for civil and criminal attorneys. With any kind of practice, but mostly with criminal defense, a lawyer may learn from a client that they committed a crime ascribed to someone else. When an innocent person is faced with conviction, imprisonment, or in some cases, the death penalty, and the attorney is mindful of the injustice occurring to a third party, the lawyer is still bound by the rules of confidentiality to honor their commitment to their client.” (Strutin, 2015)
And this begins the case with Mr. Alton Logan. In 1982, Alton Logan was convicted of killing a security guard at a Chicago-area McDonalds. Even though the testimony that Logan was at home when the murder happened, the jury still found him guilty of first degree murder And to top it off, the two attorneys, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, knew Logan was innocent. And how did this knowledge come about? Andrew Wilson, the attorneys’ client, admitted to the murder. The two attorneys who were representing Wilson, for killing two policemen, was told by Wilson that he was also guilty of killing the security guard at McDonalds. But because of the attorney-client privilege, Coventry and Kunz kept Wilson’s confession to themselves and allowed an innocent man spend 26 years in prison. (Courant, 2008)
So what is this Attorney-Client Confidentiality? As defined in Wikipedia,” the Attorney-Client privilege is an American legal concept that protects certain communications between a client and his or her attorney