Daniela Jampel, the on-maternity-leave attorney for the New York City Law Department fired after supposedly lying her way into a press conference Monday morning and grilling Mayor Eric Adams on the wrongheaded mask mandate for toddlers, wasn’t fired for espousing a political opinion that’s at odds with the official line. She’d already been doing that with persistence and passion for many, many months, on her Twitter feed and in other forums. Nor was she terminated for confronting the city’s top elected official, though there may have been grounds to sever her employment if indeed she fibbed to get into an event.
Officials at the Law Department say they decided to sack her soon after a tweet (now deleted) in which, identifying herself as a lawyer for the city, she claimed to have proudly “represented cops who lie in court, teachers who molest children, prison guards who beat inmates,” adding that after the defense of the mask mandate for little ones, “I am ashamed to call these city attorneys my colleagues.” That kind of direct (and, the Law Department says, totally false) opining on the substance of her work undermines her ability to do her job.
The Law Department defends the city as a whole, and also individual city employees accused of wrongdoing. If and when a department attorney establishes that there was serious misconduct by an employee, she is supposed to stop providing him taxpayer-funded representation. If in her tweet Jampel is telling the truth, she was doing her job wrong. If she isn’t telling the truth, she is maligning her clients and potentially compromising cases.
All city employees have broad (though not boundless) constitutional rights to speak and write about matters of public interest. They have a right to challenge their own employer’s rules, as many did loudly when protesting vaccine mandates. Indeed, then-cop Eric Adams made a habit of vocally decrying NYPD policies in the 1990s.
But an attorney doesn’t have a right to blatantly misrepresent her office or the people she represented, then keep her job thereafter.
