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, Fri, 17 Jan 2003 12:39:40
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I am an attorney (sort of a prosecutor - it's a little hard to explain to non-lawyers exactly what I do). My wife is also a lawyer, and she's a former public defender now in private practice. I think I can add a little perspective to this discussion (and hope it doesn't get buried because this is an old thread).
First, prosecutors do NOT prosecute blindly. A prosecutor takes the investigative work provided by law enforcement and compares that investigation to the legal requirements of a criminal charge. If the investigation supports the charge then the prosecutor proceeds and prepares to prove in court that the defendant is guilty of the crime with which he/she has been charged. Though the public rarely sees it, prosecutors often tell law enforcement folks that the evidence thus far gathered is insufficient to charge someone with a crime and they've either got to gather more evidence or, if that's all there is, move on.
Second, defense attorneys are defending the system as much as they are defending the defendant. The question is not whether a defense attorney can prove that his/her client is innocent. Rather, the defense attorney is there to make sure that the prosecutor does his/her job of proving that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and that the prosecutor doesn't use any extra-legal tactics (like sneaking in hearsay evidence, which is presumed to be unreliable). If defense attorneys don't do their job then every one of us is at risk of being imprisoned whether or not we've committed a crime. Just ask the many individuals who have been released from death row because their cases were assigned to defense attorneys who didn't have the experience or resources to properly defend their cases.
Yes, there are some moral dilemmas for defense attorneys. But for every "guilty" person that walks because a police officer stopped him illegally (for example), there are hundreds of people who don't get illegally stopped because that officer knows that the case will get kicked if he does stop someone illegally. For every O.J. Simpson, who walks free while there remain serious doubts about his innocence, there's at least one Ellen Reasonover - a woman who spent 15 years in jail for a crime she did not commit because a prosecutor hid an audiotape that contained exhonerating evidence and the defense attorney was too overworked to properly prepare to cross-examine an unreliable jailhouse snitch who was given a reduced sentence in exchange for damaging (and now proven to be untrue) testimony. I guess my point is that, while defense attorneys face ethical dilemmas, most of those dilemmas can be solved based on the constant reminder that keeping one innocent person out of incarceration is worth setting 100 guilty people free.
posted by 65.218.1...
, Fri, 17 Jan 2003 12:39:40, Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:24:02, Fri, 17 Jan 2003 16:52:48
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