I know that attorneys have to put aside their own opinions about the guilt or innocence of their clients.
Suppose a defense attorney really believes that his client is guilty of the crime, yet the verdict turns out to be “not guilty.” Does the attorney ever publicly admit that he actually considered his client to be guilty?
He certainly should not.
It may well have happened, but it’s not the ethical thing to do.
I’m with Bricker. A criminal defendant is entitled to the zealous, ethical advocacy of his lawyer. The lawyer’s responsibility doesn’t end with the acquittal. If the defense lawyer began discussing the case and his belief in his client’s guilt - or, far worse, revealed client confidences - the prosecution and the police might take another look at the case and find something else with which to charge the client.
Even if the defense attorney is truly convinced of his client’s guilt, he or she should take that belief to the grave.
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct:
Just to shed a little dark on the matter, I think there is a difference between the attorney giving an opinion (“The evidence couldn’t be produced but I thought he probably did it”) vs. betraying the attorney/client confidentiality (“Even though he got off, the first thing he told me was that he really did it.”). Neither is acceptable but the reasons why might be different for the two. I’ll bet a lawyer that did either one would be out of work thereafter.
One thing I learned from the O.J. case media coverage is that a lawyer will often not ask, “Did you do it?” because he doesn’t want or need to know. Instead he asks, “What is the potential evidence against you that we can defend against?” So the lawyer will often not know for a fact whether the client actually committed the crime.
(ICYHAG, IANAL)
As the others have said, a lawyer may not reveal facts the client tells him or her in confidence. However, attorneys frequently represent clients that they know would be guilty but for the knowledge and skill the attorney uses to get them off. The client tellsthe lawyer what happened, and from that information the attorney learns that the police acted improperly, and so the attorney successfully has the evidence, which would have convicted the client if it had been admitted into the court, excluded from the case. Without implicating evidence which the attorney had suppressed, the defendant goes free.
Is it possible for an attorney to use information “to the disadvantage of the former client” if the former client is dead?
This was actually the issue in a recent case in North Carolina. An attorney for a deceased man had information in confidence relevant to a quite different prosecution. He refused to release any confidential information until directed to by a court of law, thanks to attorney-client privilege. Top state court finally ruled on it, agreeing that he’d properly complied with the ethical canons but was obliged to release information from a deceased client on court order “in the interest of justice.”
What Polycarp said. The ethical rules don’t distinguish between maintaining confidences of a dead client and a live client. But, in certain cases, one could make an argument that revealing a client confidence would not affect the policy behind the protection of the attorney-client privilege and would be quite useful. I suspect that those situations are few and far between, and, as noted, would require a court order to ensure that the lawyer wasn’t violating an ethical canon.
I also seem to recall a case out of Ohio with some of the same facts (female attorney, though); in that case, the attorney was ordered by the court to give up the information about her deceased client and refused. The issue was whether the ethical rules trumped a court order.
Of course, I don’t remember how it came out. If I find it, I’ll be back.