[jstevens85]

Could someone explain why she felt compelled to talk? She was advised to by her lawyers, and she was concerned that she'd be arrested if she didn't. Was it because she had a legal obligation to assist in the investigation of the crime?

[rdl]

IANAL. Not legal advice. I'm far from qualified to advise on legal matters. Entertainment purposes only.

Once you're given immunity, you can be compelled to testify, since the only restriction is on self-incrimination; self-incrimination is impossible once you have immunity. (Essentially, it's also only protection against self incrimination; you can be forced to incriminate others. There are limited exceptions for doctor/patient, priest/victim, spouses, attorney/client.) If you refuse at that point, it's potentially contempt of court.

Grand Jury rules are also somewhat different from trials.

IMO, she made some seriously bad life decisions in both retaining logs (making them is bad enough, but retaining them indefinitely is horrible), and in testifying. But not out of malice, just ignorance or something. The party to blame here is the prosecution and government for creating a world where random girlfriends and journalists need to be combatants.

[marvin]

You're bringing up a good point here. I think it is seriously chilling that I am only a subpoena away from giving up the secrets of my friends that are archived in my e-mail account, in Skype's logs or on Facebook. I know secrets that, although not illegal, I would go far out of my way to keep secret because they would jeapordize the livelihood of my friends. The US government can basically look these up if it finds a good reason to do so.

A hacker would berate me for keeping secrets on other people's machines, or berate my friends for communicating through insecure channels. But most people will simply never think this way. You could have said the same for phone conversations back in the day, but these were not logged indefinitely.

I think that the loosely restricted use of electronic records is a dark development.

[sneak]

> I think it is seriously chilling that I am only a subpoena away from giving up the secrets of my friends that are archived in my e-mail account, in Skype's logs or on Facebook.

Hahaha, no you're not. Gmail, Skype, and Facebook all have streamlined and well-trod paths for turning that stuff over to the feds. If it was truly serious business, you'd be lucky to even find out it had happened.

[harshreality]

She says she was ill (from the car accident) while she was debating whether to accept the proffer, so she probably wasn't thinking completely clearly, perhaps overly affected by Aaron's paranoia. His paranoia was justified. Hers wasn't. They could scream at her lawyers, subpoena her laptop, subpoena her to testify before a grand jury... all of which they did anyway.

At least a few seasoned federal criminal defense attorneys suggest never accepting a proffer unless you're at serious risk of being prosecuted, which she wasn't.[1]

Suppose she didn't accept the proffer offer. Her laptop data still gets subpoenaed. She's still subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury. She takes the stand and takes the fifth. Either Steve doesn't give her immunity and she doesn't testify, or Steve gives her immunity blind (without having the opportunity to know what she's going to say first), in which case she's in exactly the same situation she ended up in.

Her lawyers probably decided that getting her to cooperate and accept the proffer might keep Steve from yelling at them so much, and it didn't violate their duty to her, since cooperating or not didn't affect her so much as it affected Aaron, so they advised her to cooperate. Since she wasn't a suspect and Steve was being hostile anyway, her laywers could have told her to do just about anything short of perjuring herself or disobeying subpoenas, and they would have adequately served their duty to their client; the outcome for her would probably have been similar, too: after the grand jury appearance, she never heard from Steve again.

[1] http://www.wisenberglaw.com/Articles/Queen-For-A-Day-The-Dan...