On L&O every defense lawyer is a sleazebag, always trying to get their clients confessions thrown out, trying to get all evidence against them thrown out. I get that a lawyer is paid to do some of this, but aren’t they not meant to defend people they know are guilty? Do lawyers to this is real life?
Law And Order is just a television show.
Police who illegally coerce people into confessions and seize evidence without probably cause or warrant are the scumbags, lawyers who keep them in line are acting ethically. Ideally the legal system is based on evidence, not on someone who ‘knows that guy did it but can’t prove it’. While it doesn’t always live up to that, it is in fact highly ethical for a defense attorney to force the prosecutor to actually prove his case, and to hold police accountable when they violate people’s rights. I would not want to live under a legal system where ‘he looks guilty’ means a lawyer can’t defend you.
A lawyer is obligated to serve his client to the best of his abilities. It’s not a lawyer’s job to decide if his client is guilty or innocent - either way, the client is entitled to the same service.
Since you like getting your information from TV shows and Movies, go see Bridge of Spies, and see how James Donovan (Tom Hanks) handles defending Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), someone who never denies anything that he is charged with.
A lawyer needs to ensure that the accused is given every protection of the law. They safeguard the process.
I can only talk about the UK (though I doubt it is much different in the US), but lawyers (solicitors and barristers) will certainly defend people they strongly believe are guilty as it is not their professional job to decide if someone is guilty or innocent. It’s their duty to defend their client to the best of their abilty even if they personally think their client is guiltyBut what they won’t do is defend a client who’s instructions conflict with what they tell their lawyer, e.g. “I did it, but I am going to plead not guilty”. When this happens what the lawyer will usually do is to withdraw from the case and their former client will have to instruct new lawyers (or defend themselves).
A lawyer has an ethical obligation to represent their client to the best of their ability. They also have other obligations, like not saying untrue things. So lawyers can’t just tell lies to the jury, or allow their client to tell lies to the jury.
And if you think guilty people don’t deserve to have a fair trial, how do we go about determining which accused people are guilty, and therefore don’t deserve a fair trial, from those people who are innocent and therefore deserve a fair trial?
Wouldn’t we have to have some sort of formal process where we try to determine who deserves a fair trial and who doesn’t? But maybe, after we’ve decided that someone is innocent and therefore deserves a fair trial, we could skip the step of giving them the trial, since we’ve already decided they are innocent? Why would we continue with a trial for someone we believe is innocent? And if we’ve already decided someone is guilty and therefore doesn’t deserve a fair trial, it hardly seems worth it to bother with an unfair trial, why not just punish them straight away and don’t bother with the farce of an unfair trial?
Now, if only we could come up with some sort of name for the procedure where we determine who is guilty and should be punished, and who is innocent and should be let go. Give me some time, and I’ll think of something.
I get what defense lawyers do and I realize they are an integral part of the process and must do all in their ability to help their client walk.
And yet … when a brilliant strategy enables an accused serial killer to go free and he butchers a few more women before being caught and this time convicted; when a pedophile evades prison because of his attorney’s cleverness and ends up killing a small child when released, … Wouldn’t the lawyer feel that society might be better off if he wasn’t quite so good at his job?
It can’t be an easy job to do.
And this is why I think the job is not seen as ethical.
There are some instances where most people can agree that the legal things to do and the moral thing to do conflict. No, don’t ask me “which ones?”. You can agree such instances exist without having to point to one specific case.
Then the statement is usually proffered: “You can’t have lawyers deciding who’s guilty and who’s not, its for a judge and jury to decide.” Which is idiotic. Judges are people like lawyers, also knowledgeable in the law, and many times judges used to be lawyers. Jurors typically don’t have the knowledge of the law, so in that case, lawyers are better deciders of guilt than random people.
Which is why I always have felt that a good lawyer MUST try to tank a case if he has good evidence his client is guilty. It might not be legal, but it is the ethical and moral thing to do.
Except in real life almost no lawyering consists of brilliant strategies to get your guilty client off. Yes, the exceptions make good TV. But most obviously guilty serial killers arrested by the cops and charged with crimes don’t actually, in fact, get exonerated due to brilliant legal maneuvering by their defense attorney. You can name OJ, of course, as a counterexample. But Johnnie Cochran didn’t spend most of his career putting obviously guilty murderers back on the streets. And if Johnnie Cochran should feel bad about getting OJ out of prison, what about the jurors? Why shouldn’t they feel bad for voting “not guilty”?
Is society better off with a state that can convict people accused of crimes without proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt? Defense lawyers are heroes, they stand between us and a totalitarian society. It’s often a thankless job, not easy to do, but absolutely necessary in a free society.
No. It’s a violation of their choice of ethics. If they get an obviously guilt client off it’s the prosecution’s failure, not theirs?
No job or profession rewards sloppy work, no matter what the reasons.
Because we assign the role of jurors to a random sample of the population which are not experts in the law. Thus, any lawyer worth his salt can throw things at jurors to confuse them and sway their view. The jurors should feel bad for being tricked, but its really not their fault.
The OJ case is an excellent example.
Even though many people “knew” that he was guilty, the prosecution did a terrible job proving their case, and the Police screwed up evidence handling. So, a jury could reasonably give him the benefit of the doubt, which is what you want in a capital case.
It helps to understand the different roles in the legal system. Unless a defendant has a chosen to be judged solely by a judge (meaning no jury–judge-decided cases are known as “bench trials”), the idea is that a set of neutral participants are better situated to weigh the evidence presented by the prosecutors and the evidence presented by the defense. Not the prosecutor (and in many European systems, the prosecutor is just sort of an adjunct to a judge.) The judge? He or she is far more likely to be a former prosecutor than a former defense attorney. Guess which way he’s biased? And the prosecution works with the police, and often fails to be adequately skeptical about their stories of what happened. Perhaps you’ve seen recent videos proving that the defendants did not threaten the police, throw a punch, interfere with an arrest—but were simply minding their own business of recording from a distance the behavior of the police?
The jury system was set up to make sure that ordinary citizens get to have input into this process, and to bring multiple viewpoints and backgrounds to bear on the evidence. It isn’t perfect. It’s just way better than other systems where there are no restraints on the power of the state to assert guilt and punish people without having to prove that guilt first.
As a lawyer who’s represented clients for whom the system is very heavily weighted in favor of the prosecutors (immigration “court” doesn’t have jury trials, since the issues are civil, not criminal violations), I have to say that the awe-inspiring power of the State to seize a person, prevent him or her from communicating with others, make 'em half-crazy through incarceration, and use their own procedural tricks to throw out perfectly valid evidence…well, the idea that defendants have much power at all, even with good defense lawyers, is just…naive. Thank God we’ve got defense lawyers, they make the State play fair–to the best of their ability. Which is exactly what their Code of Professional Responsibility requires them to do.
Depends on what you mean by, “…they know are guilty”.
Of course IANAL, but if the attorney is actually, actively involved in the crime with the defendant (say they dealt drugs together) that’s a separate matter entirely. He is both violating the law (by dealing drugs) and the ethics of his profession (both by dealing drugs and by being involved in the crime of his defendant). If caught he could be subject both to criminal prosecution and/or disbarment from practicing law. The actual defendant might get a mistrial due to his lawyer’s illegal behavior, or perhaps be charged with conspiracy along with him.
But say the defendant just shows his lawyer irrefutable proof of his guilt, say a huge bag of cocaine he still has or a videotape of him committing the crime. All that would be privileged, I think, so the lawyer would not be obligated to reveal it. However, I do think it would be illegal for the attorney to help his client destroy it (in fact, I think it could be a felony). Plus the defendant’s lawyer would probably say, “Look, if you want me to continue defending you, don’t do anything like that again!” (to use OJ as an example, many think that he gave the murder weapon to one of his attorneys early on, and his lawyer hid it away. Sometime in the distant future, once most everybody’s dead, it might turn up for auction*!*)
But most certainly, if all the defendant does is immediately tell his lawyer, “Yes, I’m 100% guilty, so how do we get me out of this?”, it doesn’t really effect anything legally or ethically (beyond the lawyer’s personal conscious).
And if the law itself is considered immoral?
Society would be much better off if the police, who we’ve seen can beat up and even kill people with very little personal consequence, would not abuse their authority and then try to hide behind ‘but he’s a bad guy, and that mean lawyer got him off’. If the cops are chasing a serial killer and screw up the case so badly that all of the evidence gets thrown out, how many people have they killed directly under ‘he was reaching for a gun?’ How many times have they faked evidence or badgered an innocent person into a confession leaving the actual killer free? How many people’s pets have been killed by the cops doing a bad search? How many people’s homes have been invaded for no good reason?
A serial killer is bad, but an entire police department that can’t reign in its arrogance enough to follow the very generous rules for search warrants, questioning, and evidence handling is several orders of magnitude worse. Though a lot of their victims will be poor brown people instead of the more newsworthy sort.
Most criminal defendants are guilty. Believe it or not police do a good job of not arresting innocent people. Sometimes they make mistakes. In that case, the prosecutor will look at the evidence and decide not to bring charges.
Yes, police can arrest innocent people and prosecutors can prosecute innocent people. But we are a talking a very small percentage of people. The overwhelming majority of people that end up in a courthouse are guilty. So to answer your question, defense attorneys defend guilty people all the time.
Lawyers do have a code of ethics and it allows us to defend people we know are guilty. Why? Because making sure the prosecution has enough evidence for a guilty verdict is more important than if the defendant is innocent or guilty. A government that can lock someone up without evidence is much more dangerous than a rapist who gets to walk free.