Client interview checklist
Client interview checklist
As part of the interview, counsel should develop as many leads for investigation and evaluation of the case as possible. Therefore, questions about the relationship of the client to the victim of the crime, about his or her relationship to any others accused of involvement in the crime, and about his or her computer abilities are all relevant. The following checklist, though not exhaustive, indicates a number of areas which should not be overlooked. It should be used to aid conversation, and not in a perfunctory manner.
Therefore, it is possible that the attorney will want to ask some questions of the defendant that he or she has previously had to answer at the time of an earlier conference. These questions are valuable where they highlight discrepancies between the defendant's earlier point of view and the point of view currently held.
Having been subjected to intrusive and purposefully humiliating procedures throughout his or her experience with the criminal justice system,FN85 the client may find still another checklist distasteful, and the negative suggestions of a number of the questions contained herein particularly distasteful. It may seem appropriate to lightly but pointedly remark that this is like a system analysis that attempts to leave no stone unturned in preparing for the defense, and for that reason contains many questions that may have no relation to the client or the case:
- Name and any aliases
- Age
- Address and length of residence
- Ownership or rental of dwelling
- Marital status
- Number of children, their names and ages
- Level of education
- Present employer, length of employment
- Occupation and duties
- Present salary
- Name, address, and telephone number of closest friend or relative
- Memberships in social organizations, if any
- Membership in labor, political, or military organizations, if any
- Relationship to victim, if any; date and length of time since last seen
- Computers worked with
- Programming languages or application programs used
- Computer organizations belonged to
- Any computers owned
- Security and reliability of victim's computers
- Military service and record
- Psychiatric history, if any
- Drug history, if any
- Alcohol history, if any
- Institutional stays, if any
- Criminal record, if any
Most of the questions in the checklist require no further explanation. However, the questions involving the security and reliability of the victim's computer may require a brief explanation. Often individuals familiar with a computer system can tell about a number of flaws in the security systems of that computer. These flaws may seriously undercut the ability of the victim of a computer crime to identify the perpetrator of the crime or the mechanism by which the crime was accomplished. If, for instance, the password to an account was available to a number of people, it is hard to prove that any one of them actually used it. If the documentation of the program is inadequate to establish how a program was supposed to work, it is hard to prove that a malfunction in the program was the result of effort by the client in question.