{"id":501,"date":"2010-06-12T02:43:34","date_gmt":"2010-06-12T06:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=501"},"modified":"2010-06-12T15:44:33","modified_gmt":"2010-06-12T19:44:33","slug":"justice-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=501","title":{"rendered":"Justice again."},"content":{"rendered":"

I struggled in this post earlier today<\/a> with my juxtaposition of the (hypothetical) criminal defense attorney who takes special pride in the acquittal of a “guilty” client and the prosecutor who takes special pride in the conviction of an innocent defendant (e.g., including, and perhaps most typically, a defendant who the prosecutor believes is guilty of something but not the offense the prosecutor charges him with). Even though it was an ancillary part of the post, I went back and forth, editing the juxtaposition in and out, and finally left it in, because it seems the two cases do share and illuminate a common psychological denominator: namely, if as a prosecutor I can get an innocent man convicted, or if as a defense lawyer I can get a client who was caught red-handed acquitted, then I must be a damn fine attorney.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But are the two cases comparable on the Ethical plane? Absolutely not, and the fear that I was implying they were is why I vacillated between including and excluding the juxtaposition. There’s a lot that could be said about the differences, but the words of Benjamin Franklin will suffice here: “[I]t is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.”<\/p>\n

But what I really wanted to write about in this post is Walter Reaves’ recent blog post titled How to know if you are a criminal defense lawyer<\/a>. Walter’s answer:<\/p>\n

You know you are a criminal defense attorney if you would do it even if you didn’t have to. If someone gave you millions of dollars today and you never had to work again, you would still go into the office tomorrow (well maybe not tomorrow, but eventually) It’s in your blood, and you can’t just walk away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My immediate reaction to Walter’s answer was “Right on. Sounds like I’m a criminal defense lawyer after all.” But the tantalizing prospect of millions of dollars really made me think. Truth be told, practicing law sucks. It sucks worse than I thought it would when I embarked on my legal career, and worse than it should. You can be as right as right can be, and argue until you’re blue in the face, and all for naught. Neither juries nor judges are all they’re cracked up to be. But alas, human beings are not meant to loll around on millions of dollars. We’re meant to help each other, and Lord knows those unlucky enough to be caught in the law’s snares need help.\u00a0 Until something more worthwhile to do with my life occurs to me (or I get disbarred), I’ll stay at my post.<\/p>\n

Something else Walter writes also rung true for me:<\/p>\n

[G]ood criminal defense lawyers are advocates – they don’t like seeing people screwed around by the system. sometimes those people have money, often they do not. I don’t know any good criminal defense lawyer who doesn’t take cases from time to time for reduced fees, or no fee. They take things personally, and aren’t going to stand on the sidelines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The way I see it, the idea that the role of the prosecutor is to “do justice,” while our role is just (tautologically) “to defend,” hinges on the prosecutor’s vaunted discretion. But we as criminal defense attorneys have plenty of discretion of our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I struggled in this post earlier today with my juxtaposition of the (hypothetical) criminal defense attorney who takes special pride in the acquittal of a “guilty” client and the prosecutor who takes special pride in the conviction of an innocent defendant (e.g., including, and perhaps most typically, a defendant who the prosecutor believes is guilty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":504,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}