Mark Bennett, riffing off a post Norm Pattis wrote about Gerry Spence’s claim that he had never lost a criminal case, muses:
I wonder: what if a criminal defense lawyer took only cases that she could win?
. . .
In my last post I held up Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) as the historical figure who most exemplifies my own highest aspirations as a lawyer: to stand up for other people’s natural rights as well as my own, without undue regard for personal welfare, in the teeth of the moneyed establishment, popular prejudice, and politician-made “law.”
Who today best exemplifies this ideal? Not Gerry Spence. IMHO, it’s J. Tony Serra, high-powered criminal defense attorney, pauper, scofflaw, and ex-con.
Other titles I considered for this post were “The $200 Disciplinary Complaint” and “The $18,000 Disciplinary Complaint,” for reasons made clear below. I settled on the above title because I want it to be found by people searching my name. Transcribed below are the facts contained in the “Statement of Circumstances and Conditional Agreement for Discipline” that formed the basis for the “only” discipline for attorney misconduct I’ve received in my professional career “thus far.” [Plenty of attorneys go through life without collecting any. I'm not expecting to collect any more, unless I do something resembling this or this.] (more…)
The quote in the title of this post is from this 2006 article by the then Chair of the Colorado Bar Association Criminal Law Section, Lenny Frieling. I cite the article because it reaches essentially the same conclusion as this blog post by a baby lawyer, which Scott Greenfield mocked here on a blog he calls “Simple Justice.” Scott’s view, you see, is that the duty of a criminal defense attorney is “not to ‘do justice,’ but to defend.” Scott goes so far as to proclaim, here and here, that anybody who doesn’t parrot his view in all its simplicity (me, for instance) shouldn’t be a criminal defense attorney.
Frieling, by contrast, takes a less dogmatic and hardheaded approach: “There also are many experienced and wise defense attorneys who would completely disagree with everything I’m saying. Sometimes I disagree with what I’m saying. I respectfully suggest that my view is helpful and at least should be considered in determining the role of a defense attorney.”
Scott Greenfield takes a newbie lawyer to task for taking this question (posed to criminal defense attorneys at cocktail parties all the time) seriously and for offering an answer that Scott believes betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a criminal defense lawyer. The newbie opines that “an attorney’s ultimate goal must be to seek justice and not to simply win.” Scott explains that, to the contrary,
The fundamental duty of a criminal defense lawyer is to zealously represent his client within the bounds of the law. Our duty is not to “do justice,” but to defend. In contrast, the duty of a prosecutor is not to prosecute, but to “do justice.” The duties are not opposite or co-terminus. (more…)
After an email exchange, Scott Greenfield is no longer banning me from commenting at his blog, Simple Justice. That pleases me greatly, as Scott’s blog is one of the best if not the best criminal defense blogs out there, and I continued to read him daily despite the sting of being banned.
Today Scott concurs with Dan Slater in blaming law schools and the ABA for letting too many people into the legal profession. He argues that when there are too many lawyers running around, the oversupply inevitably means (more…)
