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Defense counsel here. This page brings me warmth and joy. That is all.
“How can you defend someone like that?” is the core of the lawyer’s bad reputation. The “good lawyers” in popular culture are the exceptions that prove the rule.
It’s represented in To Kill a Mockingbird, Daredevil, A Few Good Men: the “good lawyer” defends the “good client.” Perhaps most interesting (spoiler alert!), the “bad lawyer” Kevin Lomax in The Devil’s Advocate reforms and does “the right thing” by abandoning his client.
Most people consider themselves “good guys,” and thus identify more with the victim of a crime than with the defendant. They don’t realize that every “bad guy” that gets off represents the integrity of a principle of due process that ultimately serves to protect the innocent from false convictions. By protecting his client in this case, the defense counsel protects due process overall.
Actually, what really pisses people off about defense attorneys is when they got someone off through the exclusion of evidence because of technical improprieties in evidence collection; when people talk about a criminal getting off on a technicality, this is usually what they are referring to. The problem with the exclusionary rule is that it only protects the guilty. If the police kick in the door to your house, toss everything you own out on your front lawn, and do this in front of all your neighbors, and don’t find any evidence against you, the exclusionary rule doesn’t help you. Likewise, if the police have a technically proper warrant, but plant evidence during the search, the exclusionary rule won’t help you (If you can prove that the evidence was planted, the judge will exclude it, but, honestly, if the police were planting evidence against you, you probably want the jury to hear about that). The only way the exclusionary rule helps you is if there is a technical impropriety in the search, and the police find real evidence against you. And the latter condition usually means that you are guilty. Furthermore, the exclusion of evidence owing to errors by the police doesn’t punish the police; it punishes the public. In short, the exclusion of evidence is almost never an appropriate remedy.
It does, however, give incentive to the state to gather evidence responsibly.
The exclusionary rule works on the same principles as the entire criminal justice system. It is a deterrent and retribution against the cops for doing something they weren’t supposed to do. It is a wrist slap, but it generally works well because it causes the defendent to go free when the cops felt strongly enough about arresting them to go over the line.
The theory is that police abuse would be far more common and a lot worse without these rules. To be honest, in this case, we are probably dealing with the one check on police power that actually has much impact at all.
” The problem with the exclusionary rule is that it only protects the guilty.”
Not… exactly.
Excluding misleading evidence can shorten the process for someone who would have been found innocent.
It can also save an innocent defendant from being convicted of a crime they didn’t commit (coerced confessions, anyone?).
So no, the exclusionary rule doesn’t *only* protect the guilty, though upon first look it might seem that way.
And allowing in misleading or inflammatory evidence can result in the conviction of an innocent person, so oddstar is wrong on that, but more important, if you value rights, then you must value the rights of the guilty as well as the innocent, so claiming that a measure “only” protects the rights of the guilty does not impeach it.
The end of oddstar’s post has more merit, though, as the exclusionary rule has little bite as a deterrent against bad police behavior.
I never realized that. Thanks for giving me something to think about!
The exclusionary rule also discourages “accidentally” torturing you for information, which you should be in favor of if you ever get wrongfully arrested.
When I first told somebody I wanted to be a lawyer, I was told, “You have to help guilty people get out of jail, or you’ll starve to death.”
Because criminal defense is the only branch of law, naturally.
Even in criminal defense the job is mostly about sentence minimization, not preventing conviction.
Remember that our second President, John Adams, defended the British troops involved in the Boston Massacre. I think the “How can I not” is actually a quote from him.
Why does the defendant not have any pupils?
I think it’s got something to do with shorthand for characterizing him as a monster, while remaining vague about his actual crimes, considering the top image.
Ahh, so Lady State (with the hammer) is a monster?
Wait a minute, since when does the prosecutor defend people?
Sorry, the change of perspective wasn’t clear here.