How accurate are the TV shows about law?
I am watching The Practice right now, and the lawyers just figured out he’s really guilty, but they aren’t going to stop arguing his innocence. If he is really guilty and they know it, why are they allowed to lie to the judge and jury?
Lawyers allowed to lie?
Dunno…ask Johnny Cochran.
If you can’t convince them, confuse them.
Harry S. Truman
The lawyers may still be defending him in order to insure that the prosecution convinces the jury beyond reasonable doubt of his guilt. Remember that he would have the right to an attorney no matter what.
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The lawyers may still be defending him in order to insure that the prosecution convinces the jury beyond reasonable doubt of his guilt. Remember that he would have the right to an attorney no matter what.
How could I charge full price to the man whose lust for filthy magazines kept me in business through that first shaky year. Oh, by the way, here’s your new issue of “Gigantic Asses.”
-Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
The lawyers cannot knowingly lie to the judge and jury. That’s against the law.
But they don’t have to say what they know, either.
It is up to the jury (judge, in some cases) to decide if a person is guilty. You don’t want the defense lawyer to work with the prosecution. The lawyer should do his job and defend his client. If he doesn’t feel he can, he should be fair to his client and step down. Otherwise, the client might be able to appeal on the basis of poor/inadequate defense. The client is entitled to legal representation.
Again, it is up to the jury, not the lawyer, to decide guilt.
A defense lawyer owes a duty of candor towards the tribunal. They cannot lie, nor can they knowingly permit perjured testimony.
I saw this week’s episode of The Practice. Far from being certain of her client’s guilt, Rebecca merely discovers a fact which makes his guilt much more likely. The client never admits guilt to her, merely repeating, “It was a good shoot.”
She is ethically obligated to argue that theory of defense. She doesn’t KNOW it’s false.
It’s up to the jury to decide questions of fact, and the judge to decide questions of law. If the defense lawyer is permitted to interpose his own judgement, then the guaranty of the right to counsel becomes almost meaningless.
Our system of justice is adversarial. The thinking is that if each side has a passionate advocate, then a neutral observer, listening to both sides, can best determine the truth. If the defense lawyer abandons that advocacy, the system won’t work as designed.
It’s not perfect. But what system would work better?
Remember, too, that THE PRACTICE is produced and often written by David Kelley, who worked as a lawyer before going on to write TV. He usually knows his stuff.
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Well… that’s of dubious value, since Kelley also created and writes Ally McBeal, which bears no resemblance to reality in the practice of law.
For that matter, I could write a book (or at least a few dozen paragraphs) about ways in which any of the popular law-based shows stretch realism. But that’s going to be true of almost any show: their goal is to entertain, not be a documentary.
They have about 52 minutes to show you at least one, if not more, cases from start to finish. Corners are going to be cut to keep the drama high.
I love Law and Order’s vision that the Manhatten DA is intimately involved in these cases each week, and that an executive ADA and an ADA have enough time to spend working out the details of one case, no matter how minor.
The reality is that ADAs (at least in Queens, according to a good friend who was a Queens ADA for ten years) often carry caseloads in the high hundreds, and often don’t have enough time to review the case file until the day before - or the morning of - trial.
But that wouldn’t make good TV, would it?
This is why lawyers are thought of as scum by everyone, if they can knowingly get a guilty person off. What if it was someone who was guilty of something really serious, like molesting children, and the lawyer knew his client was guilty? Or even OJ that murdering bastard!
For ordinary situations, sure everyone deserves a lawyer, but not when the person is GUILTY AS HELL and even his lawyers know it.
Here is the problem: when you and I, normal people, argue a point we believe in it. But a lawyer argues whatever the person pays him the most wants him to say. This is why there are a million lawyer jokes, because everyone views them as people who’s opinions are FOR SALE!!!
Lawyers should have the courage to do what is right and not hide behind “The System”.
I don’t think the above described concept fits in with the purported motto of “Equal justice under the law”.
Even if you’re guilty, you still have rights. Defense lawyers exist to make sure that even the guilty are protected.
> Even if you’re guilty, you still have
> rights. Defense lawyers exist to make sure
> that even the guilty are protected.
So a child molester, who is caught and found to have FILMED HIMSELF ON VIDEO doing his crime to many different children, should get to go free? Because someone didn’t read him his rights?
Bullshit!
And just how often do situations like the one you described above happen in real life?
This question is starting to slide over into Great Debates area I believe.
I think that last post was a touch harsh, or perhaps for reasons I don’t agree with…
My problem with lawyers is more of a system-wide thing.
Lawyers make money on laws, if you graphed in income of lawyers over the years, it probably increases with the thickness of the books of law. So, lawyers are going to support more laws, and more complex laws, and barriers to layman understanding, not to mention practicing law. And then you throw in judgements setting predecents, from judges who were lawyers. And then most (more than half, from what I’ve seen) of politcians in office are lawyers. You get a ruling system geared to job security through job obscurity.
It’s getting to the point where sometimes having a non-lawyer involved in something is a liability. In patents for instance, you now have to keep engineers from reading patents to determine if they conflict because theoretically the poor engineer can’t understand the subtlties which a lawyer can spot. So if you are sued for infringement later, it can be used against you that one of the engineers had knowledge of the patents. So lawyers have basically created a field where you have to hire lawyers or be automatically found at fault.
IMHO, laws should be simple enough that you can theoretically know all of them. If a law is too obscure, it shouldn’t have force. I mean, if you need to hire a legal team just to determine if an action might be illegal, or open you to a lawsuit, it raises the bar and prevents the little guy from playing. Already patents are estimated to cost $2 million USD to research, obtain, and begin to protect, this is without trial expenses if you sue/are sued.
Sort of like people supporting tax revision, to clean up tax law to where a layman can actually understand all the rules, I support this for all laws. How do you morally hold someone responsible for a crime they didn’t, and couldn’t, know was a crime?
Just to incite discussion, I also propose that all laws expire, if not renewed every 25-50 years, to remove old, contradictory laws which were passed for what seemed like a good reason a hundred years ago but makes no sense now.
We live in a complex society which requires complex laws. Take the Internal revenue Code, for example. It’s evolved to the point where it is for a couple reasons. First, Congress has decided to use it as a tool to encourage social and other goals by implementing deductions and similar provisions. Homeownership = good, so we got the mortgage interest deduction. Capital investments were similarly encouraged through various means.
Of course, some people abused these provisions through tax avoidance schemes, so the provisions were amended (and made more complex) to thwart the abuses. People then figured out ways to work around the new provisions, so Congress addressed those new ploys. Continue this process for 75 years, and you get a complex code.
In a lot of cases, the complexities came about to protect the public and make life more difficult for the corporations or con artists who used to take advantage of the regular person. Securities laws are an example of this. People are more likely to invest in the stock market because they have confidence that insiders are bound by securities laws which ensure fairness.
Simple laws sound nice, but they usually end up being unfair in some cases, or subject to abuse. Dealing with the exceptions and abuses leads to more complex, but better and fairer laws.
Don’t believe it? Consider Russia. One of its major problems is its lack of a good legal system. Its laws are inadequate to regulate a modern economy, and its judiciary is weak. The result? Abusive cartels, insiders stealing from the public, a tax system that is ineffective, and suffering consumers.
Is our legal system perfect? Of course not. Its main problem is its cost. In my experience, the system leads to the correct (or nearly correct) result the overwhelming majority of the time, if you have the money to pay for the process.
Attorneys are required to present the strongest case possible in defense of their client. The strongest case possible consistent with the truth. That’s the law, cut and dried.
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WhiteNight, in the world of criminal law, theoretically, a law is unconstitutional (“void for vagueness”) if it does not give reasonable notice to reasonable persons about the type of conduct that is prohibted. Note that an accused must have standing to raise this claim… if a law prohibits having an open flame outdoors, and the defendant is accused of building a thirty-foot bonfire, he can’t claim the law is vague because it might prohibit someone lighting a cigarette.
You raise the spectre of patent law, about which I know very little… but the guarantees of due process for criminal law are not as protective in the civil arena of intellectual property.
AvenueB-dude,
This scenario is pretty unlikely. Even if someone isn’t “read his rights” the only thing that becomes inadmissible as a result is the statements he makes to police. The videos would be evidence even if his statements weren’t.
That said, I can imagine a way - an unlikely way - that it could come to pass. If the videos were discovered only as the result of the suspect’s statements, then they would be “fruit of the poisonous tree” and also inadmissible.
Even then, the state might save its case with the doctrine of “inevitable discovery,” based on a Supreme Court case called Nix v. Williams, which stands for the proposition that if the state can show it would have independently inevitably discovered the evidence anyway, there is no requirement to suppress it.
The idea for the exclusionary rule of evidence to make the fruit of unlawful police conduct useless for prosecution. This is necessary to deter police from violations of constitutional and statutory protections in spite of the high social cost of letting obviously guilty persons go unpunished.
In simpler terms: it is better for society to occasionally let guilty people free, because it protects all of us from unwelcome govermental interference in our lives.
The basic premise of our legal system is that it’s better to let a guilty person go free than to imprison an innocent person. That’s why the system is geared the way it is.
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Random:
Yes, I realize that incredibly simplistic laws don’t work. “Thou shalt not kill” is great in theory, but doesn’t allow for the police, the military, self defense, etc.
But, there is a middle ground.
And a lot of this comes down to judges. This is why many things in the criminal code say ‘reasonable’.
If this is taken too far and doesn’t have checks against it, you get Russia, where it’s all up to the judges and they can be bribed. But this strikes me as more of a problem with the system, not the laws.
Bricker:
Yeah, civil law is even messier than criminal.
I had never heard about ‘void for vagueness’, I’ve only heard ‘ignorance isn’t a defense’.
I can imagine someone arguing a law is vague, but not that the whole system is so complex that there’s no way someone could have known about the existance of some specific law to begin with.