I have a carry permit, [Facebook Friend]. The problem is that if you pull your gun, you must use it. I am afraid that, with your volatile relationship with your baby’s daddy, you will kill your ex — your son’s father. Better to get a taser or a canister of tear gas. Effective but not deadly. If you get a shot gun, fill the first couple rounds with rock salt, the second couple with bird shot, then load for bear.

This is still probably okay, apart from the suggestion that “if you pull your gun, you must use it,” which I’m pretty sure is not actually required by law. But the problems really started with the next paragraph:

If you want to kill him, then lure him into your house and claim he broke in with intent to do you bodily harm and that you feared for your life. Even with the new stand your ground law, the castle doctrine is a far safer basis for use of deadly force.

Emphases added. Now, I know that, like me, you are outraged by Sitton’s shocking failure to hyphenate “stand-your-ground law,” which is why I added the emphasis. Because I don’t want that to overshadow the more problematic words in this paragraph, namely “[i]f you want to kill him, then….” Because if those words are not followed by something like “don’t” or “you should not” or (more to the point) “I cannot advise you further,” that could end up being a problem. And as you can see, Sitton did not use such words.

The Facebook friend responded to this, saying “I wish he would try.” This does start with “I wish,” but it could still tend to undermine a “castle doctrine” defense if the person in question ends up dead. So it wasn’t a great idea for her to say this. But it was a far worse idea for Sitton to respond again, advising her to destroy that evidence:

As a lawyer, I advise you to keep mum about this if you are remotely serious. Delete this thread and keep quiet. Your defense is that you are afraid for your life — revenge or premeditation of any sort will be used against you at trial.

Yes, “keep mum about this,” he posted on Facebook, on a page that he did not control and which could be viewed by, at a minimum, any of his friend’s followers, and possibly any followers of their followers, if not all of Facebook’s more than two billion users worldwide. Be sure to keep this on the down low, my friend. Mum, as they say, is the word.

She did take his advice and delete the thread, which also deleted all the comments. But in the interim, someone else posted (referring to the ex), “He’s likely already seen th[is] thread!” And indeed he had. Not long after that, the district attorney general had seen it, and eventually, so did the Board of Professional Responsibility.

After investigating, the Board filed a petition alleging that Sitton violated Rule 8.4(a)–(d) (part of Tennessee Supreme Court Rule 8). He argued that his comments were “taken out of context” and that he had not actually been counseling the woman on how to get away with murder. He filed a motion to exclude the Facebook posts from evidence, for a reason the opinion doesn’t give but was almost certainly wrong, and he waived the argument at the hearing anyway. (He also argued that Rule 8.4 is unconstitutional, which it isn’t.) The hearing panel found he had violated Rule 8.4(d), which prohibits “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice,” and 8.4(a), which declares that it is professional misconduct to violate the Rules of Professional Conduct (I hope that one doesn’t surprise you). It recommended suspending Sitton’s license for 60 days.

The Tennessee Supreme Court agreed Sitton had violated the rules, but disagreed with the penalty—which it multiplied by 24.

Sitton argued, in part, that he did not mean his words to be taken literally, but rather the opposite: they were “hyperbolic, dark sarcasm” meant to “shock [her] out of the delusion” that the discussion they were having was acceptable. The hearing panel’s interpretation, he said, was “wild speculative theory.” He also deployed the high-risk, high-but-unlikely-reward argument that he could not possibly have been stupid enough to actually give such legal advice on Facebook:

[T]he Panel’s speculative theory [he argued] cannot . . . be reconciled with the fact that the correspondence was in public — in plain view. There is no conceivable reason that Petitioner, a lawyer with nearly 30-years [sic] of experience in New York and Tennessee, would have been stupid enough to publish such words openly in public view had there been any sinister intent or were this instruction to be taken literally.

The logic makes some sense, I suppose, but this is a hard argument to win if there is evidence from which a court could conclude that you were, in fact, stupid enough to do just that:

We agree with Mr. Sitton that it is hard to conceive of any reason why a lawyer, any lawyer, would offer instructions on how to commit murder and stage a concocted defense. But we disagree with Mr. Sitton that his publication of the advice on a public platform such as Facebook cuts in favor of his position. To the contrary, … Mr. Sitton’s decision to publish these comments on a public forum made his situation exponentially worse.

Just to make the holding clear: the court agreed with the hearing panel that “[g]iving advice as a lawyer about planning in advance how to claim a defense to killing someone is conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice in violation of Rule 8.4(d).” Don’t do that.

The court conceded that his conduct did not exactly fit what is usually considered “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.” He was not actually advising a client in an existing legal proceeding, for example. But he was giving a specific person “instructions on how to kill” another specific person “and manufacture a claim of self-defense,” including concealing evidence (including the advice he had given her on how to do this). This was over the line: