Anonymous v. Anonymous
| Decision Date | 17 January 1969 |
| Citation | 298 N.Y.S.2d 345,59 Misc.2d 149 |
| Court | New York Supreme Court |
| Parties | ANONYMOUS, Petitioner, v. ANONYMOUS, Attorney, et al., Respondents. |
This application seeks to compel respondent, an attorney, to disclose the names and addresses of his clients. It is brought in connection with a habeas corpus proceeding to obtain custody of the natural child of the petitioner.
The petitioner herself is an infant, who at the time of the birth of her child on October 26, 1967, was 19 years old. The child was born out of wedlock, and arrangements were made prior to its birth to turn it over to the anonymous couple who are respondents herein, with a view to their adopting it. Petitioner signed an acknowledged consent to the adoption. However, the status of the adoption proceeding is not known since the respondent attorney has refused to disclose this information. Petitioner voluntarily surrendered her son to the intended adoptive parents on the day she left the hospital. They paid the confinement expenses, but their identity was not revealed to petitioner.
Respondent attorney has refused to identify his clients on the ground that the information is confidential and that its inviolability is protected by Section 4503 of the CPLR. This section has a long history. An earlier version of it, Section 353 of the Civil Practice Act, was exhaustively reviewed by Justice Shientag in People ex rel. Vogelstein v. Warden of New York County Jail, 150 Misc. 714, 270 N.Y.S. 362, affd. no op. 242 A.D. 611, 271 N.Y.S. 1059. That case involved the right of an attorney to withhold the identity of the person who had hired him to defend fifteen persons accused of working for a gambling ring systematically engaged in a policy operation. A grand jury was investigating whether the attorney had been retained in connection with a scheme for Prospective wholesale violations of law. It was held that the privilege did not exist to shroud the client's identity, since it was first necessary to establish the relationship in order to call the privilege into being.
The sweeping scope of this holding was limited by a much later case in the Court of Appeals (Kaplan v. Blumenfeld, 8 N.Y.2d 214, 203 N.Y.S.2d 836, 168 N.E.2d 660). There the Court held that an attorney might properly withhold the identity of his client from the Commissioner of Investigation where his motive was to protect his client from illegal reprisals. He had already disclosed to the Commissioner what his client had told him of racketeers operating on the waterfront with political protection, and for him to have identified his client would have defeated the very purpose of the confidential relationship. The Court recognized that the general rule requires disclosure of the client's...
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