Do You Have the Right to Plead Not Guilty When Your Lawyer Disagrees?
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> "This is a very difficult issue," he says. "Obviously most of us would think that the lawyer should just do what's in the best interest of the client in the view of the lawyer."
That doesn't seem very "obvious" to me, any more than it seems "obvious" that a doctor should just go ahead and carry out a medical procedure he recommends after I refuse it.
scenario 1:
> Doctor: undergo my recommended treatment or you will die > Patient: no
scenario2:
> Patient: Doctor, please chop off one of my hands for no good reason > Doctor: no
lets add a scenario 3:
> Doctor: I need to chop off your hand within the next hour or you will die > Patient: no
What do you think the doctor should do?
> Doctor: I need to chop off your hand for no good reason > Patient: no
A more realistic scenario is probably DNR orders, which doctors do honor.
> Wrongful life. Theoretically, if a patient is resuscitated in the OR against the patient's wishes, a “wrongful, life” lawsuit could be filed. Under this suit, a patient could request compensation for ensuing expenses for continued life, negligence, and battery. An Ohio appellate court reviewed a case in which a patient was resuscitated after a DNR order was documented on his chart.12 Although the court in this particular case rejected the wrongful life theory, it did uphold the possibility that battery and negligence had occurred. This case has made it certain that the advance directive is an important component of a patient's chart.
[0] Evelyn Eckberg RN: The Continuing Ethical Dilemma of the Do-Not-Resuscitate Order http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1016/S0001-2092(06)626...
Doctor: undergo my recommended treatment or you will die
Patient: no
Patient: Doctor, please chop off one of my hands for no good reason
Doctor: no
There are plenty of instances where you have the right to compel another person to do things.
I can go on all day.
The poster above you does not understand what a 'right' is and is trying to make a point about positive vs negative rights, but doesn't actually understand the distinction.
> The poster above you does not understand what a 'right' is and is trying to make a point about positive vs negative rights, but doesn't actually understand the distinction.
Ok. Nice talking with you. Have a good day.
In the latter there's no clear upside other than "for fun", and definite harm.
The line is drawn between "do no harm" and "force good".
It stems from respecting a persons right to liberty, and when trying to respect some other rights of one party involves the forced action of another party, it often may incroach on right to liberty of the latter party.
The idea of when it's acceptable to encroach on someones liberty using some type of forced complience is a complicated dance, as it should be. Personally, I usually lean on the side of respecting liberty above others. This necessarily involves respecting everyone's right to excercise their liberty in order to be an asshole, idiot, bigot, etc.
> for no good reason
Does that cut mustard? Why not?
After all, it seems self-evident that nobody would seriously ask for these things if they themselves didn't believe they had a good reason, yes?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15948330 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19132621 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17115518
It's in the interests of the judicial system that each client is entitled to a vigorous defense on a level playing field. That's the only thing that keeps the system working (as broken as it is). It's in the interests of the clients to do various things. Those things do not necessarily involve a vigorous defense or the best possible outcome for them.
If I signed a paper absolving my lawyer from damages, then asked him to punch me in the nose, should he? I don't see why not. If I did the same thing with my doctor, should he? Absolutely not.
This is the study of ethics, that is, the types of behaviors that professionals expect of one another as part of their profession. Ethically, I think the lawyer felt he should enter and defend the guilty plea. Whether or not that is the correct ethical decision -- and whether or not that decision is in the best interests of the judicial system -- is the interesting part.
(I'm a big lover of freedom, so I'm in the second camp. If you're able to stand trial you're able to plea anything you'd like. But I guess there's some question here because of the public's desire not to let anybody be put to death by the courts that might have avoided it with a better defense?)
If they decide this lawyer did the right thing then it seems to me like we've created three tiers where there used to be two: competent and incompetent. Now there's competent to stand trial, competent to stand trial yet incompetent to defend themselves, and completely incompetent to stand trial. Things would get a lot more complicated.
Seems like this might be a boutique definition of "vigorous defense."
In reality there is usually wriggle room concerning motive or the suitability of the charge, say. But I know a lawyer who has turned away clients who have flat out confessed to him.
But how does he know his client is guilty? Is he supposed to judge his client?
What reason would the attorney have for not believing the information that the client confesses voluntarily under the veil of attorney-client privilege?.
Considering the historical reliability of the ways in which we find people guilty of crimes that sounds like a terrible system.
1) Defendants have the right to a trial, regardless of how "obviously guilty" they are in anyone's eyes.
2) Trials are, in part, about whether the state has met its burden to prove the elements of the case, regardless of the lay truth of the accused's guilt. [A]
3) Given the above, the work of a lawyer (in a trial) does not inherently involve the representation that "this defendant is innocent", but only that "there is insufficient evidence of that element of the case", which needn't be a fraud on the court, even if the prosecution's claim is true.
(With that said, more specific lies can be off limits.)
[A] A Man for All Seasons: "The world must judge according to its wits; this court must judge according to the law."
2) Yes.
3) Yes. The difficulty arises when the lawyer has been provided with evidence by the client which supports the charge.
Ultimately it's the lawyers job to present the client's case, however implausible. However, "I did it but I want to pretend I didn't" isn't a case, it's a lie.
If you agree, that's walking back on your original comment; if you disagree, that seems to go sharply against 1/2/3.
Edit: As the others note, this is going sharply against well-known legal principles. Do you have any authoritative citation that UK lawyers can't represent clients at all on a not-guilty plea while believing them to have "done it"?
Edit: the first was, the second was hired by the family, who filed that his client was indigent and he was to be paid from public defense monies.
> But he was continually at odds with his public defenders, eventually firing them for refusing to file subpoenas he prepared for a dozen witnesses, who he said could support his alibi defense and other claims. He briefly acted as his own lawyer until his parents hired Larry English to defend him, and even then, the defendant continued to file motions in his own defense.
> English repeatedly advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison instead of the death penalty or to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but McCoy repeatedly refused, insisting that he was innocent.
This is how innocent people end up on death row.
A lawyer advising you to plea guilty is not necessarily assuming you are guilty any more than a lawyer saying that you have a solid basis for a not guilty plea necessarily assumes you are factually not guilty.
The lawyer is advising you on their opinion of where you will get the best (which may merely be “least terrible”) result from the legal system.
Now, they may or may not be doing a decent job of that, but that's a different issue.
As a side note, I've been told that public defenders will actually tend to get better deals from prosecutors than private counsel because they have to work together so much that they tend to know when the prosecutor will bend.
Also, I do not condone plea bargaining. I think it generally distorts justice in ways that are very corrupt, and create very mis-aligned incentives.
... or resign.
There are lots of instances in professional services where you simply have to say 'no'. If you're not willing or able to represent your client in the way they want to be represented, the correct response is, "I'm sorry, but I'll be unable to continue to advise and represent you on this matter."
In the doctor example above, the doctor will—and should—absolutely refuse to follow your instructions to cut off your arm. (If you are insistent, you can probably find someone in the body modification community to do it for you, though a) it's probably illegal for them to do so and b) don't confuse that with legitimate medical intervention.)
Lawyers may not be free to do so, though they can try.
Absolutely freaking not. This is not how professional services works. I hope this is not actually an endemic perspective in the legal community?
That is highly contextual. A coworker of mine called that the "Physician <-> Prostitute Spectrum." Certain service providers will pretty much do whatever you pay them to. Other service providers will filter their request through their expert knowledge. This also depends on the nature of the request, of course. It's not like a Doctor is going to give you a sex change you didn't ask for, if things are working correctly.
Whether to plead guilty should be up to the client, unless they aren't competent.
A better analogy would be going to a prostitute and insisting on a condom, but then the prostitute pokes some holes in it and becomes pregnant "because you seemed lonely so I thought a child might be best for you". That would be a case of requesting one service (protected sex not resulting in pregnancy) but getting an undesirable one (unprotected sex resulting in pregnancy) solely because the service professional disagreed with "what's in the best interest of the client in the view of the [prostitute]". Which, to put it mildly, is not what you paid for. :-)
If a hired professional disagrees with a course of action that a customer has explicitly requested, the appropriate action is to decline to enter into a professional services arrangement, or break an existing one. Not just go ahead with whatever you wanted to do anyway because you think its better.
Not a better analogy. The same analogy. It's a counterpart to the unwanted sex change from the Doctor. (From what I've read, it's certain that an unasked for sex change was performed by some doctors on some infants.)
> State psychiatric experts found McCoy mentally competent to stand trial.
> McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity
> people who represent themselves in major criminal trials often have enormous mental health problems and imperception of reality.
It is a very, very high bar these days in order to be found mentally incompetent, and as there is no social safety net, the mentally incompetent are disproportionately prosecuted via the legal system.
This seems more like the court thought he was fine and the lawyer decided the guy was mentally incompetent himself, which, given the article lists several other mistakes the lawyer apparently made, this sounds like he just was kind of a crappy/lazy lawyer.
In case anyone thinks I'm not considering the difficulties faced by overworked public defenders, I here ya, but the lawyer that screwed all this up was retained by his parents.
> He briefly acted as his own lawyer until his parents hired Larry English to defend him, and even then, the defendant continued to file motions in his own defense. English repeatedly advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, but McCoy repeatedly refused, insisting that he was innocent. Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt, in hopes of avoiding the death penalty."
Right, but it sounds like a big part of the problem here is that the bar is set very high here, perhaps more than is reasonable.
Or go to an engineer or architect and ask them to design something manifestly unsafe.
One of the differences between a profession and a customer service job is telling the client "no" if the client is asking for something inappropriate.
This is more reminiscent of the doctor refusing to amputate your arm, and then instead cutting off your little finger while you ask him not to.
I doubt the lawyer has his client's interests in mind all the time: A new trial with more money coming up, media exposure, "25 years is jail isn't that bad, could've been life," "if we wrap it up by Tuesday, I can still make for Jeff's birthday party" etc etc. Lawyers are human and representing clients is a business. The most important period in your life is just another trial to him.
Bottom line: Unless the lawyer is willing to do his client's time, he should be overruled by the person that really stands to lose, the client.
Let's rate representation from 0-100, with 0 or a negative being a drunk lawyer, sleeping through the trial, and 100 being the dream team, 10+ lawyers with unlimited funds.
What if your lawyer rates a 15 (scale 0-100) and simply says that that's what I really believed, given the evidence and resources avail ? Who is going to disbar /blame him when he recounts the challenges he faced?
> Who is going to disbar /blame him when he recounts the challenges he faced?
The disciplinary commission of the State Bar, who will be reviewing the information provided, and will be composed aren't 15s.
And, quite possibly, a court hearing a malpractice claim and applying the professional standard of care.
Even if we keep the pleading stage, a guilty plea should require the approval of the judge based on his evaluation of the evidence. It should not be possible for the police to get away with punishing someone without having to present their evidence. The evidence should be submitted to the court before the pleading begins.
This is a misunderstanding of how things work and is begging the question. Part of the trial is determining what punishment is appropriate based on the facts and arguments presented in the trial. Indeed, determining the "circumstances of the case" is at the core of what a trial is.
Police can threaten any punishment they want. Police only get to assign punishment for a crime if they choose to end your life on the spot.
The District/State Attorney (and their assistants) are the ones that have to prosecute and are the proxy for the state that choose the opening bid for punishment.
I would argue that there is little or no "abuse" of plea bargaining.
The current system has evolved from a fitness function which encourages more laws, fewer prosecutors and judges per capita, less time per defendant to plead their case in a courtroom, and more incentive for prosecutors to appear to "win" the vast majority of their cases.
There is no place in that fitness function for justice or ethics. Those who appear to get those luxuries get them entirely because they have the means to leverage the legal system (usually before/during the crime, not after the arrest).
It's unrealistic to expect that mere mortal humans to know all of the laws that govern them (I doubt most people have read more than a paragraph of state laws that govern them), let alone to understand them with the expertise of a lawyer.
There's not enough resources for cities or states to allow more than ~5% of people to plead innocence in a courtroom so the plea bargaining system isn't being "abused", it's a necessary evil in order for the extremely expensive society we have.
I don't know about ethics standards in the practice of law in Louisiana particularly. Every state is different and Louisiana seems a bit more different than most because of the influence of the French legal tradition.
The lawyer here is (poorly) seeking to preserve his client's rights to as a possibility-mentally-ill person, notwithstanding the earlier competency findings. This is not so uncommon in death penalty trials, and again competence adjudication seems to vary by state. But in seeking to preserve his client's life, he's sacrificing his client's agency, which is a sort of liberty interest most defendants want to retain even if they are in physical custody.
It might seem to the lawyer that his client has a death wish and just can't bring himself to admit it, and suicidal intent is de facto evidence of incompetence in many jurisdictions. Also, it's not unusual for a defendant to turn on the attorney post-conviction; eg if English argued the defendant's version of events, and he was convicted and sentenced to death, the new lawyer might have sued him anyway by arguing 'my client is obviously crazy and yet English helped him to throw his life away in front of the jury instead of getting him the help he needs."
It's yet another reason I think we should get rid of the death penalty.
So, in one extreme, you have the right of the individual to choose how the counsel should act, and in another extreme, if you let an individual abuse that right, you create a loophole by which a guilty criminal can postpone their trial basically indefinitely.
Basically, if this was software engineering, they found a strange behavior of the system, and are trying to define if this is a bug or a feature. That’s why the case is in the Supreme Court - it’s them who will decide if this is legal or not.
As one of the appeal filings puts it, the right to swap out your representation is not absolute.
"Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt, in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. Indeed, in his closing argument, he told the jury that not only was his client guilty but that he had taken any burden for this conclusion off of the prosecutor and the jury."
"Directly contradicting his client's instructions, he suggested that McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity, and should therefore only be convicted of second-degree murder. But as the prosecutor would soon explain to the jury, that defense was legally unavailable to McCoy because Louisiana only allows a diminished capacity argument if the defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. It was one of many mistakes English appears to have made during the trial."
In any case, a lawyer is supposed to act as one's agent, and in this case, it certainly appears that the attorney in question was acting incompetently when not directly contradicting the defendant's desires.
As frequently happens, this will probably turn on what amounts to courtroom etiquette. Should the defendant have fired the lawyer "earlier", given no clear definition of "earlier"?
Edit: was told my irony was too subtle. That last sentence could be rewritten as, "should a defendant whose council is not actually representing the defendant correctly be required to sufficiently understand legal procedure as to accurately intuit undefined deadlines that have emerged through caselaw on their own, from prison, in order to replace the rogue council?" Kafka would only grade this a C, I think.
Still, my conclusion is the same -- the defendant should always have the right to steer his own defense, and if his lawyer actually countermands him then it should be grounds for a mistrial. And disbarment of the lawyer IMO.
The defense attorney's decision to relieve the prosecutor and jury of the burden of establishing guilt by unilaterally proclaiming it against the wishes of the defendant and contrary to the "not guilty" plea seems so incredibly irresponsible that I think disbarment should be considered.
Indeed, the judge should have paused the trial at that moment to have a little discussion with all the lawyers about what happens to people that intentionally try to cause a mistrial in their court.
I am not a lawyer, and I am not familiar with how they police their own, but if I were working for someone that wanted me to deploy untested software full of bugs and security holes straight to production, I would restrict my efforts to vigorously attempting to talk them out of it, resigning, or just doing exactly as they asked. I definitely would not independently publish a proof-of-concept malware designed to exploit said bugs and security holes. If someone is aiming a gun at their own foot, you do not stop them from doing it by blowing off their entire leg with a bigger gun, loaded with dum-dums.
I am not familiar with the evidence presented at trial, but I am familiar with several investigative journalism reports that partially reveal some of the tactics and practices used by corrupt cops and prosecutors to secure convictions of apparently innocent people. Of course, the jury would have been made up of people who are not quite so skeptical of the emissaries from justiceland, and I'd wager they are ignorant of such tactics. So it isn't surprising that the defense attorney was desperate.
By the way, it certainly sounds like the guy is guilty, but he does have a right to an adequate defense. On further investigation, the parts of the story where he tried to hang himself with a bedsheet prior to extradition, and where ballistics experts determined conclusively that the recovered bullets were fired from a particular model of weapon seem very suspicious to me. The former is strongly correlated (in my mind) with police beatings and the latter is CSI voodoo, like bite mark evidence.
A. He did it; he is guilty. B. The justice system in Louisiana is corrupt and biased against black people and poor people.
Both can be true at once. This results in a situation where he is guilty, everyone knows he is guilty, and then everyone--including the public defenders' office--tramples over his right to due process in a rush to execute him.
Does the attorney have more of an obligation to pursue the desired strategy, or to try and save the client's life?
It's probably all because his preferred strategy was 99% likely to result in a guilty verdict, with capital punishment.
As I have learned from movies and television, sometimes the defendant demands that all the obvious winnable strategies are completely off the table, and their attorney then has to be incredibly clever, to not only secure a not guilty verdict, but also uncover the real killer by forcing them to admit guilt on the witness stand. This guy's lawyer maybe watched too many of those shows, and thought admitting guilt was actually the clever courtroom twist that would lead to the happy ending?
The attorney has an obligation to act in the interests of their client. When the client is issuing instructions to the attorney that are apparently contrary to their own interests, does the lawyer do what they say they want or do what the professional believes they need?
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/16-8255...
In this situation, I would accept a defense lawyer basically immediately resting their case, if they truly have nothing with which to defend their client. But standing in front of the jury and actively pushing the same content as a guilty plea would contain is going to far. Alas, there is not a law against someone being an idiot in court, it isn't even obvious how one could possibly write that law, and if the client insists on an innocent plea, at the very least the defense is obligated to not actively contradict that plea, even if all that leaves them to do is say nothing.
If you think prosecutors already have too much power, probably a pretty popular opinion around here, we certainly do not also want the defense to get into the prosecution game! Let the prosecution do its job, if it's so obvious what the verdict should be.
This is bizarre to me. They're not saying he didn't try to fire the lawyer, they're saying he did but it doesn't count. Can anyone explain that argument in any more detail?
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/16-8255...
So... either it's not that simple, or something else went wrong here.
(Not the video at the top of the article; the picture on the 2nd page)
http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/lawyer-submits-gu...
If you allow shenanigans to stop a trial in process, you are essentially giving the Defendant veto power over a trial when it doesn't go his way.
At some point the Judge has to make the case happen. When and how is a tough question I'm pleased I don't have to answer.
This not being possible is, I assume, the only excuse for what the lawyer has done here?
NO, if the lawyer does the time for me. Otherwise, F him, it's my life
But your second statement is not accurate. The question is whether the defendant has the right to control his lawyers actions in court. Intuitively, the answer is obviously yes, but the lower courts disagree.
I happen to disagree with them but that's their argument.
I hate hypotheticals, but let's do one here because the extreme helps frame potential issue.
Let's say the man standing trial disagrees with the strategy of his counsel, he fires them and gets new counsel. Rinse and repeat, no counsel is willing to actually follow the clients wishes and put up a proper defense - this hypothetical defendant is literally unable to obtain counsel to help defend him in court.
In reality, could he have likely found counsel willing to put up a defense? Likely. But factoring in financial burden or competence of his choice of counsel, it's entirely possible he would either A) be unable to pay for a more expensive lawyer actually willing to defend him and B) a lawyer he could afford is either unwilling to put up a defense or lacks experience to do it properly.
I'm not a lawyer, but from a novice understanding of the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct not abiding by a clients decision to enter a Not Guilty plea (which I would take to include defending that plea) is unethical - likely to prevent the model problem I described above from occurring. Specifically Rule 1.2(a).
What's at stake here is two issues:
1. Is the choice of whether or not to concede to elements of the crime (this isn't the same as entering a plea) one of the rights that defendants retain even with a lawyer?
2. Does the fact that this is a capital case color the decision? English's argument was that conceding to the murder could help reduce the sentence from execution, and that his duty to minimize his client's sentence trumps other concerns.
Personally, the answer to the first question does seem to be "yes" to me, but the second question does give me some pause.
It isn't a "get out of jail free" card. It's a "stay in mental hospital instead, probably longer" card. Insanity pleas exist because the purpose of the justice system is, in principle, to improve society -- not to punish -- and prisons are in any case not equipped to incarcerate the insane.
Thanks lawyer did block a not guilty plea (obviously since the case went to trial); the lawyer told the court the client was guilty during the trial, which was the lawyer's opinion.
I frequently find NPR rather biased in misrepresentation of details in its articles.