I dunno if you've all been following this moronic argument, voiced most loudly by Dick Cheney's daughter, that lawyers who represent those accused of terrorism are doing so because, deep down, they want to see terrorists free to roam our boulevards and kill more Americans. I have no great love for lawyers as a whole but I like and respect certain ones and, you know, some of them do have something to do with the law functioning properly. When the law functions as intended, we all benefit. Even the sickest, most reprehensible ax murderer is entitled to counsel and that doesn't mean the attorney who represents him is in favor of ax-murdering. The attorney is just in favor of our justice system functioning as it's supposed to.
I no longer remember enough about the case to give the specifics but back in the early seventies, there appeared to be a serial-type killer in some town in Northern California. A man was accused of — I think it was — nine murders. There was pretty solid evidence against him on one or two and enough similarities to the other cases that he was charged with all nine and it looked like he'd be easily convicted of them all. A court-appointed lawyer stepped in and took a lot of heat for even representing the man. People protested outside the attorney's office with the predictable arguments: The accused is guilty as sin. A monster who did what he did doesn't deserve a trial, let alone a lawyer. Let's string him up and not waste our tax dollars. Et cetera.
Well, obviously, I'm bringing this up because that "conventional" wisdom was wrong. The lawyer proved that the defendant was innocent in six of the cases. He did hard time for the other three — he may still be doing it for all I know — but he had nothing to do with the other six. I recall some suggestion that the cops and prosecutors knew or suspected as much but they had these unsolved murder cases on their hands and it seemed convenient to just blame this guy so those cases could be marked "closed." Later, there were actually some arrests made in those six cases — arrests that probably would not have been made if the first guy had been convicted of all nine.
It was to our advantage — society's, that is — that the defendant had a fair trial with actual legal representation. It helps us to make certain that the guilty are truly guilty and that the precise nature of their guilt is accurately determined.
One of the troubling things for some people about Guantanamo has been the number of detainees who, by the Bush administration's admissions and actions, should never have been there at all. Some were there for years and that doesn't help us one bit. It hurts us, in fact. But Dick "we never made mistakes" Cheney is angry (I guess) that some lawyers participated in a process that pointed some of that out. Fouad al-Rabiah was kept in prison for seven years after authorities had determined he had done nothing to warrant arrest and that there was no crime with which they could charge him. The lawyers who helped free him didn't "help the enemy." This guy wasn't the enemy. But they did point out where the Bush-Cheney policies had done enormous damage to an innocent man.
After I wrote the above, I noticed that my BBQ-dining buddy Kevin Drum wrote on the same topic yesterday. He links to this piece by Orin Kerr that makes a major point: There is this anger against lawyers for arguing that certain detainees be freed. Why is there no anger directed at the judges who said in response, "Yeah, you're right," and freed them? I guess lawyers are an easier target…and I suspect some of those lawyers were Bush appointees and the Cheney forces can't very well admit/argue that they put terrorist sympathizers on the bench, can they?