Ever since 2010, when Miles was confronted by Pittsburgh officers David Sisak, Michael Saldutte and Richard Ewing, critical facts about what happened have been disputed.
As Miles walked to his grandmother's house on a cold January night, the officers claimed Miles was acting suspiciously and tried to flee when they hailed him. What happened next has been the subject of two federal civil lawsuits. Miles claimed the officers jumped him without identifying themselves, while the officers say they alerted Miles that they were police officers, and feared that a bulge in Miles' jacket might be a gun, though no gun was ever recovered.
No one disputes that social-media evidence was gathered to frame Miles as a threat to the police.
"Jordan Miles was ripped," Jim Wymard, Sisak's attorney, said during the first trial. "You saw the MySpace page. He called himself Bulky J. He wanted to be bulky!"
That characterization still sticks with Miles.
"All I really do is work my arms because that's the main attraction," he says. "They were trying to paint a picture like I was some Incredible Hulk. That's not who I am."
In August 2012, a jury found the officers innocent of malicious prosecution, but deadlocked on whether the officers erroneously arrested Miles or used excessive force. This March, a separate jury awarded Miles around $119,000 for false arrest, but said the officers did not use excessive force. An appeal from Miles is expected.
It's not clear what effect the defense's characterization of Miles through these photos had on the jury; lawyers for the police officers said their case didn't hinge on them. But while it's not uncommon to introduce evidence gathered from social media, legal experts say the language on the invoice from CSI, the company that investigated Miles, could suggest two separate ethical problems.
One is the use of deceptive tactics to gather information by creating a fake social-media account. The other is trying to communicate with Miles on social media without his lawyer's permission, even if there had been no misrepresentation.
The part of the invoice in question is dated Nov. 29, 2011, and states: "Create e-mail address and social media networking profile in attempt to connect with Miles." The invoice lists others involved in the case as well as unnamed "associates" whom the company also apparently tried to reach online.
"My initial instinct is it sounds not kosher," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fakhoury. "You don't want to trick people into saying or doing things or turning over information under false pretenses," noting the invoice does not definitively show that CSI investigators used deception.
Miles says he doesn't remember getting any suspicious emails, but he accepted plenty of friend requests from people he didn't know because there were a lot of people "who wanted to show their sympathy for me."
But even if investigators didn't misrepresent who they were online, just sending a friend request has been interpreted by some courts to constitute improper contact, Fakhoury says. "The idea is we don't want people to meddle with the attorney-client relationship."
According to a formal opinion issued by the Pennsylvania Bar Association, "attorneys may not ethically contact a represented person through a social networking site [...] regardless of the method of communication." The same opinion prohibits deceptive practices including having someone else who won't be recognized make the social-media contact — even if they are honest about who they are. In other words, it would be unethical for a lawyer to ask a friend of a friend to contact Miles in an attempt to gather information, even if there was no deception.
CSI maintains its investigators did not violate ethics rules.
While the company has a history of conducting investigations for the city, CEO Louis Gentile says the city isn't a major client. City Paper reported last month that the Monaca-based company was hired to investigate an incident last summer in which a teenage girl was punched and arrested by an officer at PrideFest. CSI determined that the officer did not use excessive force.
On the Miles case, Gentile says that CSI wasn't the lead agency, but "we may have done some background." The city paid CSI about $2,000 for services related to the Miles case, including $93.75 for social-media-related research.
Asked about the company's use of social media to investigate Miles, Gentile says his investigators would "never attempt to contact a plaintiff without a lawyer's permission," and that "whatever we do goes through two attorneys on staff. We don't do anything that's ethically dubious or illegal."
Asked about the Miles invoice, Gentile wrote in an email: "that was an attempt to track public social-media postings and any public interactions with each other." He declined to answer specific questions about why the invoice says there was an attempt to "connect with Miles"; why the invoice distinguishes between "monitoring" social media and "connect[ing]" with Miles, and whether that means his company tried to "friend" him or create a fake profile.
"I believe that everyone should be perfectly transparent," Gentile says. But "there's a time I have to defer to the client."
The city law department, the entity that would bear ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the investigators it hired, declined to comment for this story.
But according to Randy Torgerson, a private investigator of 14 years and president of the United States Association of Professional Investigators, it's plausible that the city wasn't directly supervising the investigators.
"It's highly possible the city did not know," Torgerson says. "No investigator lays out the minute details of everything they're going to do for the client."
Ignorance of specific investigative tactics, however, wouldn't absolve lawyers involved in the case of responsibility. "An attorney can't say, ‘I just had no idea [investigators] violated these rules,'" says Wall, a social-media legal expert who has written extensively on the topic. Lawyers, he adds, are responsible for staying on top of ethics opinions that could affect their casework.
In general, Torgerson says, it's "pretty common" for investigators to friend people on social media as a way of gaining access. He doesn't think that necessarily crosses an ethical line.
"The best place to find how somebody is — is what they tell their friends, what they tell anybody else outside the courtroom."
Still, using social media while acting on behalf of a municipality to befriend someone like Miles — who had already retained a lawyer — could be different.
"You're trying to defend a government entity – you want to be beyond reproach."
