A lot of interesting responses to my piece earlier today about the charge that there's something evil about lawyers representing terrorism suspects. Here's what Jim Houghton sent me…
Well put, Mark. For whatever reason, the prevailing culture in this country during my lifetime — maybe it's been the prevailing culture throughout humanity throughout history, but I hope not — is that if someone has been arrested and charged with something, we can safely assume that they are in fact guilty by that simple fact. I suppose people don't want to consider that they could be wrongly charged in a serious crime, but the sad truth is, it happens.
It makes me crazy when people who don't trust the government to spend our tax money wisely or administer universal health care, apparently assume without question that the government is smart enough or honest enough to
decide who to lock up without charges, and even whether to torture them.When I watched Popeye as a kid, my mother made sure I understood that it was not real. Sometimes I worry that adults have lost their ability to understand that 24 isn't real, either.
You're right that folks tend to assume guilt if someone has been arrested and charged…and some of the lawyers now being smeared were representing suspects who weren't even charged. You know, I don't have a lot of confidence in our court system to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent…but I have even less in a system that doesn't even want to try to separate the two.
Here's an interesting take on it from a reader of this site named Don Yost…
There's yet another side to the legal representation argument. Back in the '70s I worked two years for the Shasta County Sheriff Department. There was horrible man who was being tried for raping and killing a number of girls and women here. I talked with the attorney representing him. The attorney told me that he was going to do his very best to represent the accused — not because he thought him innocent — but because he wanted to have the court make a decision where there would be no question as to whether he was represented adequately. The attorney didn't want the defendant subsequently released based upon a claim of shoddy representation.
Not much to add to that. I should say though that I do think it's possible to judge the character of some lawyers not so much by the cases they choose to take but by how they press them. For instance, I sure thought less of the attorneys who took on the O.J. Simpson defense but that was because of how they did it, trying to smear the police, confuse the jury and fan out a whole deck of race cards. I wouldn't though fault a lawyer for just defending someone. In our court system, everyone is entitled to counsel…even O.J. Simpson. And that's not just for his benefit. It's for the good of that system on which we so depend.