My understanding is that you cannot allow your client to lie on the stand, but otherwise regardless of actual guilt or innocence, your job is to make the Crown (or the state) prove their case. The presumption is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and the Crown must prove this if your client does not plead not guilty.
Ethically your actual knowledge of guilt or innocence shouldn’t make you defend them with any more vigour than you would otherwise. Further, if you feel you cannot defend someone to the best of your ability, you should advise your client you cannot defend them and point them in the direction of a new solicitor or barrister.
You can’t put something forward or elicit or attempt to elicit testimony which you know is incorrect.
The classic example given is that you are defending someone accused of a mugging. He tells you that he is in fact guilty. Now you cannot go and in cross put it to the complainant that your client didn’t do it or in your clients Chief elicit a denial of guilt from him because you know that is not true. What you can do is put it to the complainant that for example it was dark, that she only got a fleeting glimpse, that she cannot be sure as that is the accused, as these are is in fact all true. Of course the other side will figure out why you are doing this and so will the judge. Still acquittals can and have been secured on tactics like this usually for want of sufficient evidence.
Where you suspect that your client is guilty but he has not told you, then you can do all the things that were forbidden in the earlier example as well that just an opinion.
If your clients insists on perjuring himself you can well either withdraw or ask him to make a statement in chief only (called narrative testimony in the US) and the stand back see the prosecutor tear him a brand new asshole during cross.
Law is great as an abstraction…but how do you handle statements like this? Allan Dershowitz (Harvard Law School) once was interviewed, and stated that he believed over 90% of criminal defendants were guilty.
Suppose you defend a violent criminal, and you succeed in getting him off…then he goes out and murders someone…do you feel any responsibility? Or do you feel good that you defended him (such that he had the opportunity to kill someone)?
This is a real possibility, as studies show that violent criminals often repeat their crimes.
A bit unrelated, but just last week, an ex-con (parolled after serving 25 years for armed robbery, and 72 arrests to his credit), was killed aby a Woburn, MA police officer (unfortunately, the policeman was also killed). How does someone serving 3 life sentences (concurrent) ever gain parole?
Yes, you feel good that you defended him. 90% are guilty. 100% are entitled to due process of law and effective legal counsel.
And the course of a defendant’s life after the case is concluded is no lawer’s responsibility, professionally or ethically. That would be like saying that if you save a man’s life, you are in some way responsible for every crime he commits for the remainder of it. The Chinese might believe that, but anyone else can see it’s nonsense.
If a defense lawyer gets someone off, then there either wasn’t enough evidence to convince a jury he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, or the evidence was suppressed because the police broke the law in obtaining it. Either way the defense lawyer is upholding the rule of law with his acquittal. He’s protecting an untold number of innocent people from getting screwed over by the government in the name of catching a few extra violent offenders.
If the sentence is 25 to life, then that’s a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
Public defender here. I chose my job because I enjoy the battle and the intellectual challenge. Sometimes I’ll get a little more energized for the case if there’s a good issue, or if the prosecutor has a “crime of the century” attitude over something mundane. The client’s factual guilt or innocence doesn’t have anything to do with it, and I rarely bother to make up my mind 100% as to whether I think they are guilty or not, anyway.
Few of the cases brought forward are of dudes who don’t already have a long criminal record. So, in many cases, there’s little doubt the client is a criminal. But did he commit this crime? And, can the State prove such beyond reasonable doubt?
I remember reading of one case, years ago, where the Defense had proof their client was innocent of the crime being charged- as they were half a town away, commiting a similar (but lesser) crime. Not suprisingly, that was not used as a alibi.