What we're seeing here is the crux of the problem with allowing police (and prosecutors) to lie to a person in order to obtain a confession.<p>It's unethical.<p>And once you teach this bastardized ethics to police (and prosecutors), they now think LYING is a perfectly acceptable means to an end.<p>And then you see crap like this.
Really hard to judge without knowing the rest of the case. Lying to suspects isn't unethical. Intruding into a suspect's personal life by potentially destroying relationships is a much tougher proposition.<p>Imagine the situation where the man is actually innocent, and his girlfriend(s) go berserk on him because of the ruse.
<i>"... assistant county prosecutor Kevin Filiatraut discovered the Facebook transcripts in the file and questioned Brockler about them."</i><p>And if he hadn't put the transcripts in the file, no-one may ever have known.
Although the outcome here seems good the opposite could have very easily been the case. There's a reason why "due process" is treated as a sacred principle in democratic countries. From Wikipedia:<p>When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due-process violation, which offends against the rule of law. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process_of_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_process_of_law</a>)
The guy who wrote that blog item apparently doesn't know what county Cleveland is in. I suggest reading the cleveland.com material. I wonder why people link to the blog instead of the actual story, it's not behind a paywall.<p><a href="http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/06/cuyahoga_county_prosecutor_fir.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/06/cuyahoga_co...</a>
Don't see the problem here. He did not intimidate, falsify evidence, or otherwise violate due process.<p>His job is (was) to uphold the law, not his boss' moral code.