I’m afraid I disagree with this. There are at least two actors in the court system who shouldn’t be striving to have the accused found guilty: the judge and the defence counsel.
The judge shouldn’t be striving for any particular result. The judge’s role is to listen to the evidence as dispassionately as possible and judge according to the facts and the law. A judge who is striving for a particular result is entering into the arena, instead of staying above the fray.
And, the defence counsel definitely should not be striving to have the client found guilty. It’s just the reverse: the defence counsel is the one actor in the court system who should be striving as hard as possible towards an acquittal, if possible. If that’s simply not possible, in light of the strength of the prosecution’s case, then defence should be striving to get the best possible sentence for the client.
Re position of counsel at Bar table - Intrigued to hear Northern Piper and AK84 on this. In some jurisdictions in Australia, the prosecution sits closest to the jury whichever side of the room it is on. In my juriscition, prosecution sits to the left of the judge (right side of the Bar table) because this is traditionally thought the most “senior” position, and representing the Crown makes you ipso facto senior in that sense.
I would think the type of case that would bother rme most would be where a plea deal was offered for maybe 10 or 15 years and I advised a client to fight the case and risk life in jail. After loosing you hear the inevitable, “I shouldn’t have lsitened to you”.
But this is precisely what makes people think lawyers have morality problems. You should want the guilty to be declared guilty. Justice should always bebyour primary concern. That doesn’t mean you don’t fight, but you fight for the accused rights to a fair trial, not that a guilty person will go free.
You do not give up your duty as a human when you become a lawyer. All of is have a duty to justice.
And you fell into the all-too-common trap of mis-defining the term justice.
Justice is about the process. Not the outcome. Justice occurs is when the trial is fair, neither side lies, cheats or obstructs, and the details of the law is followed.
That *is *justice.
Which may or may not result in a guilty verdict for a defendant.
You’ve started from the assumption that it’s somehow known from some source outside the system that the defendant is really truly 100% guilty. And given that faulty assumption, you’ve then redefined “justice” to mean “get the answer we all knew beforehand was right.”
IANAL, but I just wanted to say that I can sympathize with the OP’s situation, and I’ve found the discussion with contributions from other lawyers to be most informative. Thanks for the thread.
I worked with a guy once who used to say that you weren’t a real trial lawyer until you’d won a case you should’ve lost; lost a case you should’ve won; and had you ass handed to you by a pro se litigant. I reckon that’s true across practices. One of the advantages of being a civil litigator is that it’s a lot easier to sleep at night when that happens (it’s just money at the end of the day). I don’t envy the OP at all.
Yes, lawyers want justice. But that’s more than just trial fairness. It’s also that the state respects the constitutional rights of the accused, because those constitutional rights are the ones that long experience has shown are necessary to ensure a fair trial and keep the state in check. And you also want the accused proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If the state can’t meet that standard, then justice says the accused goes free.
And centuries of experience has shown that two of the best guarantors of these principles is that the judge is neutral and impartial, and that the accused has a defence lawyer who will hold the state to those basic principles.
If the state, with all its resources, cannot provide a fair trial to the accused; cannot respect the accused’s constitutional rights; and cannot prove the case against the accused beyond a reasonable doubt; then the accused is entitled to go free.
And it is completely moral for a defence lawyer to hold the state to those basic principles, both to ensure that the individual accused is treated fairly, and that systemically, the state does not become a police state, where the only goal of the “justice” system is to lock people up.
Just to pile on, “Justice” includes the concept guilty people going free if their guilt is not established “beyond a reasonable doubt.” That’s not a flaw in the system, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In theory, at least, if the government has only established it is more likely than not a person is guilty, that person should be acquitted. I’ve never seen a lawyer actually get up and argue “sure it’s more likely than not my client did it, but that’s not enough.” We do talk about such concepts during voir dire, and hope to find jurors who are comfortable with it.