You want to defend an attorney who will go to trial five minutes after meeting his client for the first time. And you want to talk about how ethical your profession is. And you want to be taken seriously.
Well, one thing you can’t do is throw your hands up and say, “I give, I give, just throw the book at him.”
In any case, he didn’t say any of those things. He said “she did not suffer significant physical injury,” which might well be true. So, yeah, I suppose there is some middle ground.
Are you retarded? He just gave you a list of reasons why an attorney might have to do that. The alternative would be for him/her to let the defendant represent himself; we all know how well that usually works.
I believe my profession is ethical, overall, though of course there are exceptional individuals.
More to the point - the specific example of “lack of ethics” cited in the OP, namely an argument over the serverity of a sentence, isn’t unethical. The OP is simply incorrect in this.
There is nothing whatever unethical in pointing out that your client, though a rapist, isn’t ‘the worst offender with the worst offence’. That isn’t the same as excusing it or minimizing the horrific nature of rape.
As an aside - this thread makes me seriously wonder how some people envisiage how a really perfect justice system would work.
Telepathy.
Claiming that she has come to no harm is bullshit, and as a human he should be ashamed. “Maybe she wasn’t” is abso-fucking-lutely no defense for *asserting *she wasn’t.
Including making shit up?
Why don’t you ask someone who actually advocates that? Or do you prefer making shit up? I never said anything like that.
We have an ironic saying where I’m from. “Looks pretty good from my house!” How this guy can state for the record that she has come to no harm is beyond me. He has no way of knowing that. It seems to me that if fourteen men raped a woman for nearly an hour, the default assumption would be that she in fact was harmed by the experience. Or are you in the “lay back and enjoy it” crowd? I think I see why it doesn’t seem shameful to you.
Are you for real? When I first posted it several lawyers jumped in to defend him. Now that I’ve shown their arguments are bullshit, you say you’re not going to bother.
Jedi mind tricks don’t work on me.
Though if we are going that route, I’d prefer having God himself (the Old Testament one) personally judging cases.
Unless I’m on trial, in which case I opt for “trial by Jesus”. He forgives. 
I have no problem with a lawyer providing a vigorous defense. That said, I also have no problem with the jury/judge/decision maker laughing at that vigorous defense. (Then again, I have no problem with jury nullification.)
Can we get some clarification here? The lawyer was not arguing that she wasn’t harmed in any way. If he did, he should be disbarred, not because it’s a lie, but because it’s idiotic. Of course she was harmed. She was gang raped. He’s arguing that she did not suffer lasting physical injury as a result, which might be an unconvincing argument for mitigation, but a perfectly true and acceptable argument to make.
None of which apply to the cases I am talking about.
I think I see how it works now. If there is any possibility, no matter how remote, that an action might possibly, if looked at from the right angle, be ethical, then in attorney ethics it is ethical by default, because, hey, you never know, it could possibly be ethical in some bizarre circumstance. Even if those bizarre circumstances don’t apply to this case, the mere fact that you can imagine a scenario when it might be ethical makes it ok. So it’s ethical to defend a client you never met, because some other client, maybe, somewhere, may have FTAd five times. It’s ethical to to re-enter an appearance and do something that against your clients best interest, because, hey, it’s difficult to withdraw your appearance in the middle of sentencing, and in the middle of sentencing you have to do what the client says.
I got it now. I am, as Happy Scrappy suggests, getting to know you better. Not sure that was such a good suggestion on his part.
No, one lawyer - Happy - defended one specific aspect of his conduct. The rest of us have been talking about the OP.
This isn’t the thread you’re looking for.
You defended the attorney in my case in post 38. Aangelica defended him in post 40.
Yup.
I’ve said it a couple of times, but no-one it seems is listening.
The notion that this is “unethical” is simply wrong.
I suppose I did.
I thought we were talking about the OP there, which I why I said “in the middle of the sentencing phase” etc.
To be honest, I never read your first post (until my last one).
I didn’t advocate that. I was asking if there was anything you wouldn’t say to try to get your client off.
It might be? What percentage of women who have been gang-raped for less than an hour suffer no physical damage? Bruises, vaginal tears, that kind of thing.
I suspect he was not being entirely accurate here. Perhaps he meant to say “no permanent physical damage”. And I note he made no reference to the mental harm of being gang-raped.
Regards,
Shodan
Jedi mind tricks need something to work with. You’ve shown nothing.
If you’ll read the story – not just the headline – you’ll see that the lawyer qualified his statement as meaning “No significant physical harm.” That’s (presumably) true, and it distinguishes the terrible tragedy of a rape from the even worse tragedy of a rape compounded by significant, lasting physical bodily damage.
No one is sacrificing his humanity and saying rape isn’t significant harm. But he should point out, especially when seeking a modification of sentence, that we’re not talking about a case in which lasting physical bodily injury was a factor.
This is what he said, as far as we know.
“The Gosling Park incident appears to take place over less than one hour,” he told the court.
“There was no significant harm caused to the complainant. No significant physical injury.”
He seems to be saying that since it didn’t last an hour, no significant harm occurred. He then adds that no significant physical injury occurred. Your take is that he means “physical injury” when he says “harm,” but it is by no means the only interpretation, or a *necessary *interpretation.
Is being physically assaulted by a gang of men for 55 minutes insignificant, physically? Would you feel that way if it happened to you? Your loved one? It’s a bullshit statement.
And to imply that a gang rape by fourteen men is somehow mitigated by the fact that it didn’t even last an hour is heartless. He should be ashamed. He should quit his job if doing it properly forces him to make such appalling claims.
She was held at gunpoint, and thus probably didn’t struggle. So, no defensive wounds.
Vaginal tearing might be present, but probably would be no worse than if she’d had consensual sex for an hour. Does your SO suffer significant physical injury during sex? Mine doesn’t, and I’m hung like a chubby whale ( ). This, of course, could vary wildly depending on lubrication.
Presumably she suffered some physical injury, but it is entirely likely and even probably that she didn’t suffer significant physical injury, which is what he said. You could define “significant physical injury” as cuts and bruises, but I think most people would define it as “requiring medical attention”.
And you’re quite right; he didn’t refer to the mental implications of a gang rape, which I imagine are severe… but that isn’t his job, it’s the job of the prosecution.
I think one of the things we’re forgetting here is that this gang rapist and his cohorts are a bunch of evil fucks and ought to be sent away for a long, long time. That’s not in question.