That Sneaky Cur, The Defense Lawyer

A quick quiz: When you think of phrases like ‘all lawyers are liars,’ ‘the law is an ass,’ ‘first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ what vision of miscarriages of justice come to mind? Do you think of the innocent being deemed guilty, or do you think of the guilty getting off scot-free? Let me venture a guess: it’s the latter. Moreover, I would also surmise that the kind of lawyer you have in mind when these images of law present themselves is a very particular one: the defense lawyer. A sneaky, unethical, slimy, conniving, opportunist who represents the reprehensible, who puts his morals on hold and sallies forth to defend the indefensible, looking for loopholes in the law through which his client may wriggle, away from the grasp of the law and the virtuous society which seeks to prosecute him. Isn’t that really the worst kind of lawyer? The defense lawyers? You know, the ones who defend the ‘guilty’?

We have plenty of cultural representations to thank for this image of the defense lawyer. (I was reminded of this all over again as I sat through the second season of Broadchurch; in the last episode, the assistant prosecutor makes sure to tell the eager assistant defense attorney that she is a ‘horrible person;’ the series makers have done their best till then to drive us to the same conclusion; she is, after all, shown to be the master of the dirty trick, anything to get her client, a murdering pedophile, off the hook.) Remember the phrase ‘all lawyered up’ made so popular by one police and homicide procedural after another? Apparently, policemen and judges and detectives just want to do their work, but those pesky defense attorneys get in the way.

These are strange representations to deal with in a country engaged in the process of a gigantic human rights violation called ‘mass incarceration.’ Here, prosecutors engage all too often in gross misconduct, piling up charge after charge on their initial indictments, which they will then drop down to force accused into plea deals for lesser sentences, thus often forcing the innocent to choose jail time. They strike us as even stranger when we consider that the hardest working species of lawyer is the public defense attorney: overworked and underpaid, staggering under a caseload that would bring the most ardent workaholic to his knees.

This state of affairs is entirely unsurprising. We are a very self-righteous species, blessed with a sense of our own rectitude and of the guilt of others; our insecurity in the former dimension makes us lash out in the latter; our theories of punishment are infected with petty, vicious, vindictiveness. We suspect legal protections for the accused because we do not imagine ourselves ever needing them; they are there merely as smokescreens and obfuscations of the legal process. So those who employ them must be suspect too; they must be sophists and liars, manipulators employing deceitful sleight of hand maneuvers to pull the wool over our collective eyes.

Perhaps we should be more tolerant of the defense lawyer; perhaps we should not rush to judge them too quickly. Prudence bids us do so; we might need one someday.