{"id":759,"date":"2011-01-02T17:29:43","date_gmt":"2011-01-02T21:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=759"},"modified":"2011-11-14T00:16:38","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T04:16:38","slug":"what-strike-lawyer-said-re-the-defense-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/?p=759","title":{"rendered":"What Strike-Lawyer said re: The Defense Function"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently I was wrong when I recently wrote<\/a> that “everybody disagreed with . . . my skeptical challenge to the common wisdom regarding the role of the criminal defense attorney relative to justice and the role of the prosecutor.” In a post critiquing Mark Bennett’s recent post<\/a> about The Defense Function, the anonymous author<\/a> of Lawyers on Strike, noting my comment<\/a> on Bennett’s post, writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Kindley and Bennett and Scott Greenfield have had an ongoing disagreement about just what it is that criminal defense lawyers \u201cdo\u201d.\u00a0 I\u2019ve weighed in on that debate obliquely:\u00a0 here<\/a> and here<\/a>, for example.\u00a0 And here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Does this segue into The Question?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 Bennett seems to think so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(The Question is:\u00a0 how do you defend people you know are guilty?)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The quality of mercy is not strained, but the demand of justice is that wrongs be paid for.\u00a0 Can you rationally try to balance mercy and justice?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Will people differ on where or how that balance can be achieved?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 Can you be perfectly merciful and perfectly just at the same time?<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 Not in this life, anyway.<\/p>\n

How simple, then.\u00a0 There is plenty of room to defend the \u201cguilty\u201d without \u201csetting aside\u201d one\u2019s own sense of right and wrong, with due regard for one\u2019s limitations in the system.\u00a0 It is completely unnecessary to go on from there and assert that \u201cjustice\u201d, and for that matter \u201cmercy\u201d and \u201clove\u201d and a million other unseen but real things either do not exist or are meaningless and not part of \u201cwhat we do\u201d.\u00a0 But that\u2019s what Bennett and Greenfield argue.<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0 They have reasons of their own, obviously.\u00a0 I suspect I may know some of them.\u00a0 The others probably don\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

Why do I care, then?<\/p>\n

Bennett and Greenfield are prominent blogging lawyers of the criminal defense variety.\u00a0 They maintain this bullshit \u2013 and it is bullshit, since even they don\u2019t believe it \u2013 to the detriment of themselves, their clients, and other CDL\u2019s and their clients.\u00a0 As I have noted before, they justify Judge Jacobs<\/a>\u2018 and other judges\u2019 and jurors\u2019 views<\/a> that CDL\u2019s are irresponsible, wrongly hyper-partisan, self-interested and untrustworthy.<\/p>\n

Put another way, and as I believe attorney Kindley has noted, they cede the moral high ground to prosecutors and judges in advance.\u00a0 And then \u2013 somewhat irrationally \u2013 they complain when prosecutors and courts commit injustices over the objections of CDL\u2019s because they never seriously listen to CDL\u2019s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Posts in which I staked out the position to which Strike-Lawyer is referring are here<\/a> and here<\/a>. The most concise statement of my position is here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Law is defensive. <\/em>Its purpose is to prevent injustice from reigning. <\/em>The responsibility of the prosecutor within the Law is to defend the rights of all, and thereby to prevent injustice from reigning. The responsibility of the criminal defense attorney within the Law is to defend the rights of his client, and thereby to prevent injustice from reigning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As for the sanity of Strike-Lawyer’s underlying mission<\/a>, I invite readers to Google “Lawyers on Strike.”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently I was wrong when I recently wrote that “everybody disagreed with . . . my skeptical challenge to the common wisdom regarding the role of the criminal defense attorney relative to justice and the role of the prosecutor.” In a post critiquing Mark Bennett’s recent post about The Defense Function, the anonymous author of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,139,100,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-defense-lawyers","category-john-regan","category-justice","category-prosecutors"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","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=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1659,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peoplevstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}