This is a stupid argument and has been repeated many times in this thread.
If some neighborhood is run by thugs who terrorize everyone, and once in a while you need to hire a thug to protect yourself (and you’ll try to hire the meanest thug, if you can), that doesn’t mean people can’t hate the thugs for what they are doing to the neighborhood.
I’m not saying that lawyers are thugs. I’m just saying that the sentiment, expressed multiple times in this thread, that “You guys hate lawyers, but in the end you end up needing them” does nothing whatsoever to show that the hatred of lawyers is irrational.
It’s best to focus on other arguments that try to show that the hatred of lawyers is irrational. Let this one go.
I just realized that post #100 of mine was TLDR. To summarize:
Even if only 10% of the cases a lawyers gets involved in have one side which is clearly in the wrong, and if the lawyer’s firm picks cases from both sides equally, then 5% of the cases that lawyer will be involved in will be for defending someone (or some company) which is clearly in the wrong.
5% may not sound like much, but over the lifetime of a lawyer, that comes to a lot of cases in which he/she is defending the “bad guy”.
And, many lawyers are comfortable defending the “bad guy” much more than 5% of the time. And this is what gets peoples’ goat.
I agree. It is a good point, but can you, personally speaking, stand there and defend someone you feel strongly (based on evidence) is guilty?
Also, in many cases, it is company vs company, and there is no issue about cops planting evidence, just sifting through mountains of documents to find some small piece of text that shows that the company you are defending should win the case (even though it did something wrong, like infringe on a patent)
You need to be comfortable finding minutiae that will help a big corporation win a case it doesn’t deserve to win.
There’s not many professions in which acting professionally can directly interfere with justice being done fairly. I can only think of one profession in which the person who finds a loophole allowing something universally regarded as terrible and unjust to happen is lauded and praised for their professionalism.
I’ve personally had a very bad experience with one lawyer, whom the system allowed to abuse her power over a private matter. However, I don’t hold that against all lawyers (hell, my brother is a lawyer and we get along fine.) I think the legal system could use some adjustments though.
The problem (okay, the most obvious one) with your argument is that deciding who is “clearly in the wrong” is the output of the criminal legal system, not an input. And further, it’s one that you (well, maybe you; certainly Mosier) would apparently rather defer to the very people you excoriate: lawyers. You’d rather have lawyers (who are evil, remember) decide who’s wrong and who’s right before cases even reach the courtroom. This seems like a fairly glaring contradiction to me.
Another glaringly obvious problem is the unstated assumption that “bad guys” should not, in an ideal world, get legal representation. This, too, is complete rubbish. Even people who are blatantly guilty deserve representation; it is still important that the facts found at a trial are correct, that the accused is found guilty of the correct crime, and that their sentencing is just and proportionate. A defence attorney has an utterly indispensable role to play in all of these things, and can achieve them without in any way compromising a reasonable system of personal ethics. In forcing the prosecution to make their case watertight, you are ensuring that justice is done. That this can be portrayed as intrinsically unethical beggars belief.
Well, people who are annoyed by this are stupid, and deserve to have their goats taken away and put in a home for disadvantaged goats that have been owned by very silly people. Adversarial justice is right up there with democracy in the list of civilisational advances, and to turn around and accuse the very people who make it possible of being irretrievably evil is … well, I’m not even sure what it is. The shortsightedness required to sustain such a view leaves me dumbfounded.
It is possible to defend the “bad guy” one hundred percent of the time, and still be a person of impeccable character.
Again with this caricature of criminal defence being a matter of sneaking your client off the hook by means fair or foul. It’s woefully tired.
Anyway; define “justice being done fairly.” “Universally regarded” by whom? What was the “loophole”? Why wasn’t it plugged? If laws are poorly written, or police procedure badly followed, shouldn’t your ire be aimed at the people responsible? Your perception of how a fair legal system should work seems irretrievably flawed. You persist in viewing it as something wherein the correct verdict is decided beforehand by some sort of universal assent, and then arrived at merely as a contrivance by the courts, with the full collaboration of all people involved, no matter what their nominal role. It’s a truly terrifying prospect.
You know, a lot of the time when lawyers defend the bad guy, their primary role is to investigate the case; convince their client that he or she has some exposure; and facilitate a reasonable settlement.
I have my mind made up because I did not accept you hand waving away the 97% figure? You made a point that the disparity is likely lower. I agreed. I also asked you to show that the disparity is largely addressed by that or other means and you didn’t (nor did DrDeth). All I have ever read on the subject notes the disparity and notes it is an alarmingly large disparity at that. If you can show otherwise though then please do.
And beyond that disparity I noted that the people who create the system and are responsible for adjusting that system are the same people who stand to benefit from that system. You have the asylum being run by the inmates, so to speak.
I also noted other issues above which no one has touched. Please explain away what Roland Burris did when trying to send an innocent man to death row such that his own prosecutors quit rather than perpetuate that travesty…and nothing happens to Burris for it. Explain away Bush administration lawyers contorting the law to fit whatever preconceived notions they wanted to follow and most particularly the horror that is freaking torture. Explain away the very low rate of disbarments among attorneys and how that equates to vigorous self-policing (to wit look how long it took to get Jack Thompson disbarred despite his many antics…just an example). Explain away the very un-justice like, borderline unconstitutional practice of plea bargaining (I know the courts have not found it unconstitutional but to me it is more for practical matters than an actual belief it really is constitutional…see Bordenkircher v. Hayes as an example).
Add it all up and do not accuse me of focusing on one narrow issue.
This is a valid point. In theory, we don’t know if someone is guilty until after the legal system decides whether they are or not. So, in most cases, it’s hard to say that someone is “obviously guilty” or “clearly in the wrong”.
But, in practice, there is a minority of cases when we do know whether someone is at fault (person or company) even before the trial.
Are you a lawyer? Have you never defended someone whom you knew was guilty? If not, have you never defended someone whom you strongly suspected was guilty?
In both those cases, wouldn’t a good lawyer (since they can’t lie in court) simply try to bring up as many issues with the prosecution’s arguments, without never saying “my client is innocent”. In this case aren’t they defending someone who is in the wrong? [Yes, the point about having to play your part in an adversarial system, which is overall beneficial, has been noted]
I think people in many professions, not just lawyers, find themselves doing some work for their company even when it gives them a queasy feeling. They feel their company is not in the right, but they do the work, to keep their jobs and advance their careers.
So, this is not restricted to lawyers. It seems, though, that lawyers, by the very nature of their work may find themselves in such gray areas more frequently than other jobs.
Maybe as a response to RR’s argument, but not mine. I said you’re lumping all lawyers in with litigators, and your post basically listed four more examples of litigators. The majority of lawyers are not litigators. Most of them deal with mundane things like taxes or employee benefits or green cards or business sales, but you’re lumping all those people together with Johnny Cochran. We can debate whether your views on litigation are irrational, but lumping an entire class of people together and judging it by a subset of that class isn’t just irrational, it’s bigotry.
One example is that people can blatantly steal copyrighted material because there is no apparent way to write laws preventing it. Another is that someone can write a legally enforceable contract that absolves them of any legal responsibility for negligent mistakes they make during the course of their work. Legal loopholes exist that allow people to receive compensation beyond the intended legal limit of their work. Legal loopholes exist everywhere, because it’s realistically impossible to write a code of laws without them. Stop playing around here, because you know as well as I do that these things are abused by people who don’t know or care what the reality of the situation is or what the consequences are, as long as they win and/or get paid.
Lawyers are all members of the Bar. They police themselves, set their own rules, help draft legislation on any variety of issues and so on. As members of the same “club” they all bear responsibility for how that club is run. Or do contract attorney not get an opinion on what someone like Roland Burris did?
And the DoJ reinterpreting laws to enable Bush to torture and spy on Americans and so on is litigation?
As for contracts, taxes and so on those are near impossible to parse without an attorney. The tax code alone is over 16,000 pages in length. Ask any immigrant how clear and approachable the whole immigration process it…it is not simple or clear at all.
Oh yeah…watch out for the “small print”. I have personally been caught on “gotchas” with my cell phone company and credit cards. Generally the call would go something like:
Me: “How can you do this?”
Them: “It is in your contract.”
Me: “But it wasn’t like that before!”
Them: “We reserve the right to modify that without notice. It is posted on our web site if you wish to review it.”
I’m in the moron category that reads a tragic story about a 9 year old learning disabled boy jumping to his death from a rooftop while his mother left him unattended - and just knowing that the following day, some scumbag would lament the fact not enough profit can be made off the taxpayers who were footing the kid’s public housing bill.
In which case, the trial should be relatively straightforward, no? But as I said before, it is nonetheless essential that even a guilty party be convicted of the correct crime, for the correct reasons, and given the correct sentence. Do you disagree with this? If not, you must surely accept that even the guilty deserve competent representation, and that it is not just not unethical to provide it, it is an ethical imperative.
I am not a lawyer.
Having discussed this with my criminal barrister friend a couple of times, my understanding is this (and please, if any real UK barristers are around, correct my no-doubt faulty recollection). If they know for an absolute fact that the client is guilty (or rather, that there’s no realistic prospect of acquittal), then they would first try, strenuously, to persuade them to plead that way.
Bear in mind that for them to know for a fact that the client is guilty, either the prosecution must have some incontrovertible proof, or the client must have let on to the lawyer during their conversations. In the former case, then they are fairly likely to persuade their client to plead guilty. If not, then they can still challenge points of fact in the prosecution’s argument in the reasonably safe knowledge that a conviction will ensue. In the latter case, I understand that the typical thing to do (if the client insists on pleading innocent) is to signal to the judge that they are unable to represent this client, without specifying why. The judge, obviously, knows what’s going on. A client is entitled to representation, but is not entitled to have someone lie for him. If he puts someone in that position, that’s his problem.
I don’t see the ethical problem with these choices. At no point is an advocate required to lie, or even distort the truth. He can choose to, at the risk of his professional career. But at no point is he forced to compromise what I would call a reasonable ethical standard.
You portray “bringing up issues with the prosecution’s arguments” as being some sort of sneaky tactic. Not so. The burden is on the prosecution to provide proof beyond reasonable doubt, and if they fail to do so, the fault is theirs. The benefits of an adversarial system aren’t some academic nicety; they’re utterly essential. It’s not for advocates to decide what is a certainty and what is not; it’s their role to advise their client to the best of their abilities, and argue the case if required to.
Finally, even if someone is only acquitted on technicalities, or on procedural points; so what? These technicalities and procedures exist for a reason: to ensure that innocent people are not wrongly convicted. Again, it’s not for advocates to decide which laws will and won’t be followed. That’s for legislatures.
Quite possibly. But then it seems to me that we should applaud them for having the will to do such essential work in a difficult field. After all, how very easy it would be to sit back and say, “I will defend only the incontrovertibly innocent.” And yet this sort of attitude, were it commonplace, would lead to disastrous miscarriages of justice on a massive scale.
I agree entirely. In a just world, the bitch wouldn’t even get to attend the funeral before she was put up against the wall. She ought to have to pay the city cleanup bills.
But all this “You drooling subhuman” aside, the fact is that the mother of a child who was killed at least partially due to the negligence of the building’s owners (be they taxpayers, private interests, or is as likely in this case, both) cannot be awarded anything but financial damages. You take it a step further and call lawyers scumbags because some think the mother’s suffering is deserving of compensation as well?
So I guess you’re cool with FEMA’s poison trailers. Those hurricane victim motherfuckers shouldn’t have pissed God off. Christ forbid anyone believe they might be due some sort of compensation other than “I paid your doctor bill, now shut the fuck up.”
If your leg got amputated because of a drunk driver and the only compensation you could get was your doctor bill, would you think that was a just law? Would you be a scumbag for thinking otherwise?