Well, DtC said what I think in this situation.
Can he not be named to protect the girl’s identity?
I assumed that there was some evidence that the defendant wouldn’t be alive to serve out a longer sentence. It’s not uncommon (and more cost effective) to have a dying inmate released and treated in the community. I could be wrong in my assumption.
and add my voice to the chorus of "absent any specific posting history to suggest otherwise, we should assume that of course we have sympathy for the poor child. The fact that I abhor RO threads does not mean, at all, that I have no feelings for the victims. the fact that I abhor the ignorant stance of the poster I’ve been arguing w/, does not mean I have no feelings for the victims. Actually, since I abhor RO threads in the first place, I’m unlikely to express my sympathy for the victim, since I believe that type of response only encourages more RO threads.
that would be the logical assumption.
You are just such a fucking jerk.
First of all, at the time I made my post, you hadn’t said it at all. So, I’m not sure what you mean by “again” except to point out that you finally got around to saying it earlier in your response to my post.
Before I came in you did have time to write 866 words to this thread, so clearly you did have plenty of time on your hands.
Plus, you don’t seem to be lacking a well developed sense of outrage, since you found time to call the OP a “moron” and an “idiot” and also call me a “moron” later when I joined the thread.
Yet despite all this you haven’t found the time for a single bad word aimed at the HIV invected rapist, only for those who don’t like defense lawyers. That’s fucked up.
Now you claim that you think it’s self-evident that the sentance was too light? Bullshit. Terrifel specifically asked you if the sentance was just and fair and you responded “If the sentence isn’t just and fair, the blame for that doesn’t fall on the defense attorney.”
Bolding mine.
You went right back to defending the lawyer and dodged the question. That, as I said before, is just fucked up.
Yeah, he totally could have spared two minutes to hate this nasty man.
It is up to the court to decide guilt, not the lawyer, so there is no problem if a client says to his lawyer that he is guilty but then pleads not guilty to the court. (Note that even when the accused pleads guilty, it is only a plea. It still remains to the judge to decide whether or not the person is guilty. That is one of the reasons why, in Canada at least, when a person pleads guilty to a charge, the material facts surrounding the matter must still be presented to the judge. The other reason, of course, is so that the judge can determine an appropriate sentence.)
There is a problem if the client admits a fact to the lawyer and then tells a different story to the court (e.g. saying to the lawyer “I stabbed her” but then saying to the court “I did not stab her”). The lawyer must not participate in the client’s lie to the court. If the client lies to the court about a fact and the lawyer knows that it is a lie, then the lawyer must quit. To preserve lawyer/client confidentiality, the lawyer quits without saying why he or she is quitting.
To be a criminal defence attorney, you must play hard and fair by the rules, even when those rules permit a person whom you believe to be guilty to go free. That’s the nature of the job, and if a lawyer can not handle it, then that lawyer should not be a criminal defence attorney. For example, I stopped doing criminal defence work (aside from some corporate stuff) several years ago. The last straw for me was appealing a clear cut conviction of a multiple murderer. I gave it my best shot (and lost), but after it was over, I stopped taking on criminal cases. There are other things I would rather do with my life than assist evil people. At the same time, however, I recognize that if we all are to have a free society, our criminal system must be adversarial, and I am very respectful of criminal defence attorneys who, despite representing people whom I would prefer be locked up, perform a vital role in ensuring that our society remains free.
I see no reason to exclude the attorney, who is part of the judicial process as well. Why should they alone feel no qualm when a criminal gets off lightly, if they themselves facilitated that result?
As far as the ‘warrantless search’ example goes: yeah, I’d tend to blame the police for such an error. But do you even really need a defense attorney to find out whether a simple warrant was issued? Couldn’t an automatic telemarketer machine be designed to perform much the same function?
Oh really? Well, two can play at that game. There’s a very simple reason why you’re wrong, but if you can’t figure it out for yourself, then it would be pointless for me to tell you what it is. So, nyea.
Seriously, please don’t taunt the idiot. What is the difference between shielding a person you know committed a crime from the penalty, and prosecuting a person you know is innocent?
Fair enough. I concede that the question was overly general.
I begin to suspect that we’re talking past each other slightly. I’m not saying that attorneys should be actively policed for signs of remorse by some sort of Shame Squad. I’m just suggesting that a sense of moral distress ought to be an expected human reaction if a client they successfully defended actually committed the crime they were accused of. I assumed that’s what KarlGauss was getting at too, not a blanket condemnation of the American system of adversarial justice. But apparently this stance is mistaken, since so many people agree that it’s ludicrous for an attorney to care if their client is actually guilty or not.
No, just the child rapist’s attorney.
Seeing as how he lost the case, I tend to agree… and yet he still argued for a further reduction of the sentence, to two years’ community service. Now if a three-year prison sentence is unjust and unfair, then how is it a good thing to argue in favor of an even less just and fair sentence? But then of course, the attorney had no choice, he’s only doing his job, he’s not responsible for his own actions, he hovers above the courtroom without interacting with it in any way, etc. etc.
I just think it’s weird, is all. If a guy confides that he raped a woman, I think society would expect pretty much anyone to pass on that information so that the guy does no more harm-- except for his lawyer, who is expected to say nothing about it and do his best to conceal the fact from the jury.
BTW, the max for sexual assault causing bodily harm here in Kanukistan is 14 years. Aggravated sexual assault (endangering the life of the victim) has a max of life. Is giving HIV to the victim endangering the victim’s life? I don’t know what the law is on this, but simply as a person, I think that it should be.
It’s the job. A criminal defence attorney that does not aggressively press his client’s case to the best outcome for his client is negligent.
OK, i apologize. I should be more mindful of my audience, i suppose.
In the circles where i move, among my friends, and, i thought, on these message boards, the people who know me sort of take it for granted that i hold child rapists in contempt. I never thought it would be necessary to make an affirmation to that effect.
So, i’m sorry for underestimating the extent to which you, and some others, need an explicit confirmation of my contempt for child rapists.
In case this issue comes up in the future, maybe i should take this opportunity to state that, for the purposes of all future discussions regarding child rapists, you can assume my contempt for them even when i happen to be making an argument about some other, tangentially related issue.
Maybe you should bookmark this post, for your personal reference.
Not good enough. In every thread regarding the rape of children, you must express your outrage anew, or risk being labelled soft on child rape.
But, and this is me playing Devil’s Advocate here, because I’m not willing to write off the adversarial system of justice just yet, isn’t this one of those cases where the best outcome for the defendant and the best outcome for the society conflicts? It’s obviously in the interest of the defendant to be found not guilty, regardless of whether he committed the crime of which he’s accused or not. But it’s in the best interest of the state and the society to find those people who committed crimes guilty, and those who didn’t, not guilty.
Wouldn’t it sort of make more sense to have a system made up of neutral participants, whose only goal is to discover the truth, and not be biased either toward or against the defendant?
Sure, the defense attorney might, in those cases, feel guilt about the system in the same measure as any other member of society. But he should, in my opinion, feel no extra guilt for doing undertaking his professional and ethical responsibility within the system.
No, because it’s often not that simple.
For example, searches without warrants are allowed under certain criteria such as “exigent circumstances.” But sometimes the police will (either honestly or cynically) have a different argument about what constitutes exigent circumstances than what the law itself allows. In such cases, the defense attorney has a duty to bring this to the attention of the judge or the jury, and to argue for why his interpretation of the law is correct and the police officers’ actions constituted an unlawful search.
Hell, it’s possible in some cases that the warrant exists, but that the police application upon which the warrant was issued might have been missing some relevant information. Or that the judge erred in issuing the warrant in the first place.
There are dozens of other possible circumstances in which getting to the truth, and to what is and is not lawful, requires considerably more than a mechanical checking of records. And the adversarial system makes it a defense attorney’s duty to argue as strongly as possible for the client in all such cases.
Well, maybe there’s none. I concede that there is a moral evaluation here that is very subjective, and that i might never convince you (or anyone else) that there is a difference.
But we place the burden of proof upon the state for a reason. The state controls the means of coercion, or enforcement, in short, it has all the power. It should have to prove that the person committed a crime in order to justify depriving that person of liberty. And defending a person we know to be guilty is often a matter of making the state fulfill its burden of proof. I believe that if we don’t do this, we leave the door open to even more state abuse of power than already exists. The principle, in such cases, is about more than this one particular case; it’s about a system of justice that works for society.
Which is, by the way, why i might appear more critical of the OP than of the offender in this thread. I’m horrified by what the offender did, and i’ve said already that i think the penalty was too lenient. But we can fix that by changing the penalty.
On the other hand, the criticism we often see of defense attorneys in threads like this gets right to the heart of what our justice system is all about—justice itself. As Bricker suggested in the first response to the OP, it’s an attitude that implies that defense attorneys should work hard for all clients except the REALLY guilty ones.
You might be right about all this. But it seems to me that, implicit in many of these lamentations about defense attorney ethics and morals, is the suggestion that they should not only care about these issues, but that they should actually allow such considerations to affect the quality of defense that they give their client.
As i said, i’m sure many of them feel some sort of moral ambiguity about particular cases, and these human reactions are, as you suggest, to be expected. But i think that much of the criticism leveled at them is about more than that; it’s about making them feel guilty for fulfilling their ethical obligations to their clients.
But, in an adversarial system, it’s not the defense attorney’s job to decide what a fair sentence is. It’s society’s job, with the legislative branch (representing society) setting the penalty boundaries and the judge (or sometimes the jury) deciding what penalty to impose in each case. To argue that the defense attorney shouldn’t advocate for his client just because the verdict is in seems to me a denial of the adversarial system itself, and of the defendant’s right to representation. After all, if this is the case, then defense attorneys should also refuse to file appeals.
You might think it’s weird. Maybe it is. But it’s a principle that’s also at the very heart of the justice system that many Americans claim should be a beacon and an example to the world. One of the unfortunate contradictions about a truly just system like this is that the rights and interests of the bad guys are also defended, in the name of a greater level of justice for everyone.
There’s one other point to be brought out here: even with a client he knows to have committed a crime, it’s the job of a defense attorney to represent that client to the best of his ability. That might mean making the case that his client is not guilty of the crime charged but of a lesser offense. There is in some places a tradition, for lack of a better word, that the competent prosecutor charges every possible offense that might fit the facts, from attempted murder to aggravated dopery, in the belief that it’s his job to get as tough a sentence as possible.
There was a case in the Readers Digest, of all places, a few years back where someone sincerely believed himself to be guilty of a crime, was defended to the best of the defense attorney’s considerable skill, and eventually it was proven that what the accused believed himself to have done did not in fact cause the crime to happen, but rather the act of another. (I wish I could remember the details better – it involved some sort of accident, and what the accused could remember from before the accident convinced him that he had in fact committed the crime in question.)
Like everyone else, I’m appalled by the short sentence here in view of the crime. But I have a hunch Muffin is on target – we don’t know the prognosis of the convicted person, but we do know he had AIDS and gonorrhea and was in a wheelchair. It’s entirely possible he got a life sentence in that three-year sentence.
And, to recap some stuff: A defense lawyer who doesn’t do his best for his client is failing at his job, in violation of every form of professional ethics. A judge can only sentence to the maximum sentence permissible under whatever guidelines he has for sentencing – and a maximum sentence normally requires a number of aggravating circumstances and no ameliorating ones. (“Ameliorating circumstances” don’t have to be “he’s a nice guy who once did something horrible out of character” – his being in a wheelchair is a good example of one that has no moral basis but rather a physical one.) If a sentence is too light, when you know all the facts (and don’t count on the typical news story to give you them all), you know whom you have to blame? Yourself and your elected representatives.
I just decided I’m not done here.
Let me give you some of the facts in a hypothetical case, and you make a decision what’s the proper verdict and sentence. First, you get the partial information of a news story or a prosecution case – then the defense.
While you’re away at work, a man enters your house, breaking a window in the door to trip the lock from inside, and removes something that belongs to you. In the state this happens in, this constitutes burglary, punishable by a max. of ten to twenty years. And by his own admission, he did what I’ve outlined.
Now, [Paul Harvey voice]the rest of the story[/PHv]. The man is an EMT, your neighbor’s nephew. What he takes is a length of rope that, by the laws of coincidence, you have left just inside your locked front door. Why he takes it is that your daughter has been the victim of a hit-and-run accident and is spurting arterial blood, and it’s the most obvious thing nearby from which to fashion a tourniquet. Still feel the same way about his crime?
Well, the scales have certainly fallen from my eyes: child rapists are bad people, and I thank you for bringing this to my attention - really, I hadn’t considered them in this light before. And to think all it took was a prurient link - really, I suppose I ought to be ashamed of my prior ignorance: perhaps I could reciprocate by sharing the crimes of some similar bastard down here in New Zealand, so that we could all froth in righteous indignation.
Now I suppose all that remains is to fantasise a suitably grisly fate for him: should he be sodomised to death by 300 pound Azerbaijani transvestites, or should we just scoop out his eyes with a rusty melon baller and take turns crapping into the bleeding sockets? C’mon, first one to devise the nastiest retribution gets bragging rights for the most righteously outraged.
Can I use this as a sig line?
Based on past experience, I’m of the opinion that arguments of this nature form a sort of comfortable refuge for the persistently dim: when you have no better strategy, condemn your adversary for insufficient outrage. If nothing else, it’s a tactic by which one can achieve a brief delay.
Well, i take some hope from the fact that, in that thread, quite a few people called out the “persistently dim” person on his stupidity.
If you think dropping my name will polish the turd that is your credibility, knock yourself out.