When is it okay for a lawyer to lie? (2018)
americanbar.org
americanbar.org
Source: Lawyers wouldn't have the reputation they do if all the members of the club had integrity.
Once you have the slightest clue about the law, it's easy to just laugh it off. The problem is, most people don't know any better, so these tactics are incredibly effective a lot of the time.
However, you do get a truly lethal combination when you combine an asshole lawyer with a well-funded client. That's not because it's some highly intelligent, sophisticated legal team who can craft superior legal arguments. Rather, it's because they can simply brute-force their way through by outspending you.
It doesn't matter how legally "right" you are if you're not willing/able to spend the money in court to prove it. A lot of people take advantage of that, including the asshole lawyer (who, of course, profits from it).
"If you have the facts on your side, you pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, you pound the law.
If you don't have facts or law on your side, you pound the table"
The bar does not exist to serve lawyers, it exists to regulate them.
eg. Places like Prenda Law being able to operate openly for years before being shut down, etc.
The reason they continued their crimes for 3 years was that it's impossible to prevent someone from doing paperwork crimes if they aren't in prison.
While technically yes. They just opened another company and kept on going. Guess I should have said "Prenda Law and it's various incarnations". ;)
> ... it's impossible to prevent someone from doing paperwork crimes if they aren't in prison.
That's the whole point. ;)
On that note, it looks like Paul Hansmeier is now attempting to start that racket back up again, even from behind bars.
Those are far from being in opposition. A cynic might say the bar exists to serve lawyers as a class by doing the bare minimum to appear to be regulating them.
Suing a lawyer for malpractice in courts is very tough. There are all sorts of barriers. For example, let's say your lawyer fails to file legal paperwork on-time, and you lose a case. You can sue, but to collect damages:
* You have to show that in the alternative case, you would have won. The lawyer will argue you would have lost in either case.
* The case against your lawyer will likely impact your main case, and not in ways you like.
If your lawyer charges billable hours without actually working -- something which is standard practice among lawyers in my community -- you need to be able to prove that. It's the culture here:
* I've been to lunch with lawyers who bragged they were billing someone else for the time
* Lawyers routinely double-bill if e.g. handling client emails on a cell phone while in court for another client. ). How do you do that?
So it happens all the time, and I've gotten insane bills when nothing was done. You can't prove that in court, though. There's no case. And so on.
Somewhat off-topic, but here's a mind-boggling example of a lawyer's lack of integrity:
For example, a lawyer who thought she was doing the right thing and protecting many people has caused endless problems, both legal and moral, and likely ended up protecting (by tainting the case against) the very people she sought to bring to justice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Gobbo#Lawyer_X_scandal
Here's a more recent and IMO better one: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/28/former-apple-lawy...
> Former Apple lawyer Gene Levoff, who oversaw the company's Insider Trading Policy as corporate secretary and senior director of corporate law, was on Thursday indicted for insider trading and faces a maximum penalty of 120 years in prison. > Ironically, Levoff was in charge of enforcing the blackout period as part of Apple's wider trading policy and would sometimes conduct illicit trades after notifying others of the restrictions.
This seems like a trivial amount of money for someone that high up to jeopardize their career or spend years of their life in prison for. I would maybe even understand the risk/reward if it was in the tens of millions but this sounds nowhere close.
I am genuinely curious to know if this happens regularly - what is the real motivation for committing a crime that barely pays relative to the penalties?
While it's true that some lawyers are unethical some of the time, it seems highly unlikely that lawyers are unethical as often as their reputation suggests. A much more likely explanation is:
1. The complexity of the law.
2. The incongruity between the law and many people's ethical codes.
3. The skill gradient that exists among lawyers, as it does in any profession.
4. The limited resources afforded to public defenders.
5. The limited success pro se litigants typically have.
Real lawyers will mostly do things like inflate hours, inflate conflicts, exaggerate expected outcomes, and generally blow things up so as to maximize billable hours rather than acting in the interests of their client. That doesn't make good TV either.
A much more likely explanation are misaligned incentive structures, combined with a protective guild-like bar organization which lawyers belong to.
A lot of professions are structured like pyramid schemes, with partner/tenure/presidency/CEO at the top, and crap at the bottom.
On the flip side, my experience is most tradespeople are quite scrupulous, not because I can verify the work, but due to lack of competition. If my handyman takes 30% longer to work, he perhaps makes 30% less money, but life goes on. If an academic misses tenure, or a politician gets knocked out of office, careers end.
This is absolutely false and is also unconstitutional.
Calling that "source" is a bit of a stretch, no? More like "hypothesis"
This reasoning can be used for anything ranging from speeding to stealing to even murder.
Obviously the article was examining the intersection between "the law as written" and the ethics surrounding this issue.
OpenTable vs. Iverson, 4/20/2020, Santa Clara.
It’s been a saga of massaging the optics, very interesting to see the 3 requests evolve. #1 I was never served, #2 they bluffed and didn’t show up, #3 was utter slander and filed in a new county (SC, first 2 in SF proper over the course of a year). Head screw, it hurts to try to recall it all. It’s also extremely offensive to read. It’s put a serious mark on me, both credibility and also the private investigator(s) following me everywhere, hence being homeless and isolated. The original issue was an improper firing (where UI was granted, and it was improper compared to their own training).
Biz@harlanji.com. I have the latter 2/3 of the filings, and my response that I couldn’t file and a BAR complaint written (I wasn’t seved #1 but #2 references it).
This is likely related to the adversarial nature of the courts, prosecutors vs defenders. Defenders ethically need to defend equally, basic game theory, aka Prisoner's Dilemma.
In a nutshell, English barristers must accept cases from anyone regardless of their circumstances or character otherwise “an unpopular person might not get legal representation; barristers who acted for them might be criticised for doing so”.
“Justice” is the result of the process by which trials are fair - is one way of looking at it. Contrasted with the view that once we know who the bad people are (how?) guilt is presumed and summary punishment is all they’re entitled to.
Some anecdotes:
- A company I started, hired a big-brand SV legal firm, super expensive. We thought they would be great. But we were so little to them, it was sometimes even hard to get a timely response. In the end we stopped using them, but not before we signed a bunch of documents they reviewed and told us were fine to sign, when in reality those contracts left us fatally exposed (and were in great part responsible for the downfall of the company later).
- Had a complaint filed against me personally earlier this year. The complaint has some truths twisted to paint a mostly false story, but it also has plenty of lies and omissions. The lawyer(s) that wrote the complaint knew what they were doing, yet no one is ever going to get punished for it.
- Looking for lawyers to defend the case (and in previous experiences), I realized that most lawyers have certain formulas or patterns they follow for specific types of situations that they already know how to address, if you don't fall into those, then they'll either pretty much fail at the job, not do what they actually should do (sometimes even if you ask them directly), or just refuse you as a client. It is very hard to find a lawyer that will actually take the time to really listen to you, understand your story/situation and then work on a personalized strategy/solution.
I think that any lawyer that intentionally mis-represents stuff in their work, or tries to shoehorn their clients into their formulas, or just half-asses their job, are seriously lacking in integrity. And by my experience, this seems to be the case for 50%+ of lawyers. A lot of them will probably do a ton of damage both to their clients and their counterparties, and they will never be held responsible.
It's not that lawyers suck, per se. It's that you're dealing with an adversary, and if you get a 50th percentile lawyer to go against a 90th percentile lawyer, well, you could still win if you've got a good case, but it's certainly not as likely as the reverse. In many cases you get what you pay for.
You would be surprised. I do agree with the rest of your post however.
In particular it is very evident with doctors when they see you for barely a few minutes and diagnose you. Sure, if it's something super common you'll be fine, but if it's not, good luck trying to convince them to keep digging. They seem to think they are always right and you have no idea what you are talking about because you are not a doctor.
I agree 100%. One thing I do is look for similar cases and contact the lawyer on the winning side.
The "formulas" do save you money, though. Would you rather pay 5k for them to use an existing template slightly edited, or 25k to write a complaint from scratch? It depends on the case, there is no right answer.
You can also literally just look up a lawyer's cases on PACER and see how they write, see if they've won, and use your judgement as to whether they're an effective advocate. If you're dealing with a big case, this is absolutely worth doing.
One of the main issues for non-lawyers is that the first time you need to hire a lawyer, you have no idea what you are doing, so there's a huge learning curve and a lot of information asymmetry to overcome.
Semi-related but very valuable advice, if well-known - when I was off sick the council brought a complaint against me. They actually lied and implied criminal behaviour (fraud) on my part (also not turning over all the evidence to the tribunal that followed). So here's the important bit:
DO IT IN WRITING AND KEEP COPIES OF EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING YOU WRITE, EVERYTHING THEY SEND YOU. INSIST ON IT BEING ON PAPER (NOT TELEPHONE), AND PRINT EMAILS OUT.
I could rebut almost everything bad they said about me. The tribunal threw out their case before I even turned up.
(I know this is obvious and everyone says get it in writing, but things would be smoother if people actually did).
That's fairly clearly a statement of fact - that in their professional opinion they believe their client has a reasonable chance of prevailing in court.
Do lawyers not have an obligation to display good faith and professional candour in making such statements of fact, even to their adversaries?
The literal words we had written were the facts. Their meaning was up for interpretation. If something as basic as the subject of a conversation cannot be necessarily be agreed upon, something more complicated like "does this infringe on a patent?" certainly has room for disagreement.
Every person has a right to defend themselves. Even guilty ones, because until proven, how would you decide they are or they aren't guilty to figure out they have right to defend?
Most people don't know the law enough to adequately defend themselves. Even though you have the option, you would usually be well advised to use help of somebody that knows the law very well because knowing it is their profession and helping you is responsibility.
Just think about this, half of the population has intelligence below mean (ha! not average! but close). You need to generally be highly intelligent to be able to adequately dispute and represent yourself in a court.
So while I loath the fact that criminals use lawyers to escape prison I also recognize that this is their right and that lawyers serve an important function in a society the same way policemen who stop you for speeding or tax auditor looking through your papers do.
Lying to a judge is grounds for disbarment but in general a lawyer has no obligation to verify clients' statements.
It would usually be difficult to prove what the lawyer did or did not know but, hypothetically, if you could prove that the lawyer knew that there was no trespassing then a statement to the court to the contrary can be construed to be a lie and result in consequences.
For example, lawyers in the US routinely file or threaten to file defamation suits in scenarios where the law is clear that no defamation has occurred. I feel that in such situations the most charitable interpretation is that the lawyer is an idiot, and the less charitable interpretation is that the lawyer is a criminal. When a judge considers and ultimately dismisses such a suit, two options present themselves. Either the lawyer is so incompetent as to think that the suit had legitimate grounds, in which case they should lose the ability to file such suits, or the lawyer is maliciously exploiting the legal system for the purpose of harassment, and should similarly lose the ability to file such suits. The fact that judges largely refrain from sanctioning lawyers for even the most severe misconduct results in a world where wealthy individuals are frequently able to use the legal system or the threat of the legal system to harass individuals like journalists into not discussing their activities that are of public interest.
A similar example manifests in patent law, where patent trolls can pursue expensive sham litigation with impunity, to the extent that an entire market exists based on shaking companies down by threatening legal action and offering a settlement for less than the company will have to pay in legal fees to eventually prevail against the sham accusation.
There are judges who are sensitive to it and will go out of their way to punish it. I think part of the problem is that there are many occasions to "fix" the process by getting case resolved in a state that is known to be lenient to certain kind of behavior (very popular with patent trolls).
I don't think there is going to be an easy solution that could be written in law. Rather, the solution is to publicize "bad faith" behavior and lenient treating by judges.
While true, this is to a certain extent the reason why we have judges. We already rely on judges to dismiss lawsuits that are illegitimate, and since filing an illegitimate lawsuit demonstrates either incompetence or malice nothing really needs to be proved about the state of the lawyers mind.
"Under no circumstances will vendor be liable for any damages in excess of 10% of the purchase price of the vendor services"
Customers assume you are trying to scam them with language like that. But he didn't care, he just wanted to be able to be proud of how little liability we took on. I finally had to point out that the best way to reduce our liability is to shut the company down and end our need for legal services all together.
Per your third point, I was once wrongly accused in a criminal case. I was a nobody, random person making like $30k a year at the time but was able to retain someone from K&L Gates. I think he felt bad for me because he basically lobbied the partners for permission to take me on at a reduced rate (like $1.5k total). A couple letters and a court appearance later and the misunderstanding was rectified. But the important part is I was obviously a nobody, the partners at this firm bill tens of thousands of dollars a day. $1500 is probably less than a single office location spends on coffee in a week. But this guy sat with me for hours going over the case and where the problems were.
And then there is the family law lawyers ("it's not family and it's not law" according to one) but it does line a lot of lawyer's pockets at the expense of the public, at least in the five eyes. Most other jurisdictions have opted for a saner system.
So, yes, it's jungle out there. Imagine if your doctor prescribed medicine that would make you sicker so that he could charge you more later. If you don't have good reliable connections going in you really need to be careful, shop around until you find someone who seems good and honest, and then pray.
While I am aware of the audience here, I'm not trolling. There is a remarkable similarity between the "helplessness/vulnerability", for lack of a better term, of clients using a lawyer and the helplessness/vulnerability of users in using software authored by someone else (not to mention clients who hire software developers to write software for them). In each case, the client/user is required to trust the lawyer/developer.
One key difference is an issue sometimes discussed on HN:- there's no licensing requirement for developers. Lawyers have to be licensed, and the licensing requirements include ethical obligations, violations of which can result in losing one's license. While this system in practice may have some shortcomings, software developers do not have anything equivalent. There are states in the US where lawyers are disbarred every month, but I am not aware of any software developer who has been banned by a regulatory body from writing software for use by others.
Both lawyers and developers are probably subject to negative stigmas as as a result of the "bad apples". Not all are unethical.
I am licensed attorney and a full-time software developer and I agree 100% - there are remarkable similarities.
(And there are strong parallels between big tech and biglaw, especially for junior devs/associates, but that's a bit of a tangent)
Are there parallels? I mean to some degree all large, well paying orgs are going to have similarities, but a plucky undergrad coming out of CalTech will get $130k+ at a FAANGM or orgs that pay roughly in that continuum, and be able to jump to all sorts of other options, while most newly minted lawyers are looking at average salaries of $70-$80k USD while having huge law school debt on top of undergrad debt. This means ruthless wageslavery at BigLaw until you make partner or you pay off enough of that debt to walk.
As a dude with a PoliSci degree and a minor in IT, I did a good hard look at the cost benefits when I graduated... and went IT. As the bad tattoo says: "no regurts".
> ruthless wageslavery at BigLaw
Big law associates start at $190k, straight out of law school. Big law associates are, however, the top graduates from the top law schools. Most new law graduates don’t make that much, just like most new CS grads don’t make FAANG starting salaries.
Yeah, that was the sort of BigLaw I was comparing to big tech in the grandparent.
This is from the American Bar Association, it is the opposite of a blog post you would end with IANAL. Yet, we read (at the end) that even professional lawyers are "struggling" with understanding why a given accepted practice is ok given the laws and obligation. And this on no small matter: it is about hiding that the plaintiff died before the trial. And it is not clear whether it is ok or not.
I had the "chance" to discuss with lawyers specialized in intellectual property. They did not even understand their subject or the imprecision of law. Every time I try to dig into legal issues surrounding IP I end up with the impression that the difference between a lawyer and a layperson is that the lawyer just is more up to date with what was made up in court recently.
Lawyers are going to help you if you are in a case that has happened tens of times in the past but is going to be clueless in a genuinely new situation. Just as the judge will be.
Recently I read about the licensing issues around deep learning models, the definitions of fair use and derivative works. We are used to IETF standards and IEEE specs. Even RFCs are usually pretty precise in how they define things. Laws are crappy when put to that standard. They are just there to provide arguments in a mud-slinging negotiation.
As a lawyer there are rules that define standards of behaviors and violation thereof can quickly terminate not just employment but the career forever. Software doesn’t have that and the entire idea is utterly foreign. As a case in point all lawyers have a general understanding of the word ethic and how it applies to their profession. I have found, as a long time software developer, that most software developers have no idea what that word means and are quick to make faulty assumptions regarding its application. In the software developers’ defense there is not a lot of reason to accurately understand a thing that has never existed in the first place.
This is mostly a function of the industry's age, and is not true of other fields of engineering. I'll be astounded if software isn't folded into Professional Engineering by mid-century.
That may be true in theory, but in practice most lawyers will protect other lawyers, and their regulatory bodies do very little to discourage bad actors.
...and not even that. I've been told several times by very senior lawyers to ask a senior technical person for advice on thorny software licensing issues. In one case that senior technical person pointed me to a recent decision that basically answered exactly the right question.
IME/IMO, lawyers are vastly over-estimated, vastly over-respected, and have far too much political power relative to other stations in this country. We need to reform our legal system from the bottom up so that it serves us instead of the guild.
In exchange, here is a link to the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy:
I would like to find a way to make true open source deep learning models.
Debian legal newsletter [1] and lwn[2] have interesting takes on the relevance of GPL. To them, putting a trained model under the GPL implicates that you have to open your dataset too, which are the "sources". That seems somehow consensual but I still think it is debatable and could need clarification.
I also dug around the question whether a trained model can actually be copyrightable if the training code and the dataset are free. This is akin to a "compilation" operation that adds no creative input (anyway applying copyright to source code is already a bit of a hack). There is a pretty strong ground to argue that they are similar to "compilation of facts" which come with very little protection.
I am now wondering if open source can actually work for deep learning: if trained models are not copyrightable, open source licenses require strong copyright protection to be implemented. Maybe a DL model is not protected enough for that.
Finally, I am reassured by recent fair use rulings that a model will probably not be considered a derived work of its dataset and that proprietary data can legally be used to produce an unencumbered model but the legal uncertainty still exists.
If you are interested in helping me trying to figure out how to protect crucial models so that the first AGI will be beneficial to all and open sourced, I'd be very happy to have someone poke holes into my ideas.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2009/05/msg00028.html [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/760142/
The products of compilation seem to be copyrightable, otherwise software piracy wouldn't be prosecutable. Perhaps the same would apply to trained models.
Do you have a link to those fair use rulings? Also note that fair use is an American concept and doesn't apply in many countries, some of which have similar but more restricted concepts. Also, I wouldn't consider a model produced under your example as a free model, that would be more of a ToxicCandy model in the Debian ML Policy parlance.
https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/33417ce2bcf9b6a0efaf47... https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20190608184309.GA10146... https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/f544829dcd6c0f92ea11cd... https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20180712123524.GA25751...
First a quick answer to your two last questions. Programs and binaries are widely recognized as copyrightable. What I am wondering is whether the action of compiling a program constitutes a contribution worthy of protection and of additional copyright. To give a concrete example, imagine I am a company that uses gcc and big machines to provide compilation as a service. You feed it a BSD-licensed source code. My server returns a binary on which I claim a proprietary copyright. Are you allowed to dismiss it as being just the result of a totally deterministic and automated process and reclaim it as BSD? I would argue yes but it could be a non-obvious court case.
Anyway, I don't think I agree on the comparison between compilation and training.
> Do you have a link to those fair use rulings?
I was thinking about this [1] ruling (Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.) in which Google scanned commercial books and used this obviously non-free dataset to provide in-text search mechanisms. I am pretty bitter about the fact that one of the main reason for the favorable outcome (Google won) was that the judge estimated it had an "obvious" usefulness when the ruling finally happened, some 10 years after the scanning started at which point it was certainly not appearing obvious to non-tech people. So Google had to prove a tech while in a legal grayzone, a luxury orgs like Debian may not have.
------------------
Now for the real meat :-)
> The Debian ML policy linked above goes a fair way to making truly open source deep learning models
Actually, I am wondering if they are not a bit blinded by the way the GPL works and if they don't constraint themselves a bit artificially by imaginary legal precedent.
They all seem to assume that a trained model will be recognized as a compiled binary, but I see at least 5 competing comparisons that were proposed and could hold ground legally:
1. Trained models as compiled binary 2. Compilation of facts as proposed here [2]. I find it pretty persuasive even if its author dismisses it for what I think is not a good argument. 3. Rendered 2D image from a 3D model 4. 2D photograph of a real 3D object 5. Training as a copyrightable creative creation [3]
It is understandable that Debian maintainers think about everything in terms of programs and source but I feel they shoehorn a bit that notion in the case of machine learning and may not realize how much more flexible the legal framework actually is.
Admittedly, I am less interested in the consequences of slapping the GPL on a trained model than I am about finding a way to solve the potential problems caused by bad actors in the field, just like FOSS did it for regular software. I am strongly suspecting we may have to write a viral license adapted to ML.
One of my example is how would one go to prevent one's work being used by OpenAI the day they decide to refuse releasing their trained models? Or to prevent helping Google or Facebook gained an even more dominant position by adding data to an already good model?
We benefit a lot from the fact that, right now, there seems to be genuinely good will from wealthy actors to contribute to the research community but it feels to me like a Mexican standoff. What happens when one decides to run off with what is published and secretly improves it for commercial gains?
I must say that I have been happily surprised by how much things are free for use right now, from research, algorithms, frameworks and trained models. We avoided a lot of dystopias, probably through some unsung heroe researchers who imposed openness to their employers upon being hired.
The risk still exists though, as all this openness can be reversed on a whim. Basically, I am wondering how we can put all the chances on our sided that the first AGI will benefit the humanity instead of its owner?
Sorry for the wall of text, but if you are still there and would like to continue that discussion, here is fine, but real time discussion is also fine, you can shoot me a mail at yves.quemener@gmail.com and we can do Hangout or Signal from there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2018/07/msg00175.html [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/05/msg00380.html
https://learning-at-home.github.io/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24370510
I think it is also worth noticing that we are going that way but there are a lot of actors with a lot of processing power. Notice how, two years after one model breaks records, there are ways to make it run with 1000x less power. We are bruteforcing the problem but I am having doubts that raw power is going to matter a lot in a few years.
Also a cat detectors is pretty usable at 99%, not everybody needs 99.99%.
More than processing power, the real power in distributed training lies in the variety of situations. A thousand users may have a hard time having more computing power than Facebook's TPU farm but it will be easier for them to have a larger dataset.
In fact, to me that sounds like exactly what you would expect in a common law system.
I think the scenario in question had the complaining witness dying. Is a complaining witness same as plaintiff? I would think the plaintiff in this scenario is the state. Genuine doubt as I'm not a lawyer.
Legally speaking they are different, but to the layperson they mean the same thing (both are the ones on the opposite side of the defendant).
1. Can a lawyer who suspects the opposing party of breaking an agreement engage in plain-clothes trickery to figure out if that's true? Yes.
2. Is a lawyer obligated to essentially testify [respond to a judge's inquiry] in a manner that incriminates their client based on private information? No, thought when they do respond to the inquiry they should be vague rather than affirmatively lying.
3. Do prosecutors need to drop charges if, after a plea deal is signed, information comes up that would inhibit prosecuting the case in the absence of a plea deal? No, but this feels scummy.
[1] In the opinion of the average criminal lawyer, assuming that the case is litigated correctly, and that the jury isn't entirely composed of utter mouth-drooling morons prejudiced against the defendant.
I don't get the it's bad implied in the article.
Let's say it's a rape, and the victim dies, what's really changed?
You can hate the idea of plea bargains, but that's a different topic.
They admit they are guilty, so proceed on.
If it means they are screwed in challenging it later or in sentencing it might matter, but it doesn't seem the case.
Otherwise, very boring examples. Nicola Gobbo was a criminal lawyer and a police informant at the same time, but hasn't been charged with anything, I feel like there would be a interesting example in there somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Gobbo
This was civil court, not small claims.
Oh well.
Now I'm imagining that judge getting presented with evidence the defence lawyer is lying to them, and whipping out a chunky gold chain and a diamond encrusted grill...
If there was clear and obvious evidence of the lies then you can submit a complaint to the bar (or whatever the disciplinary body is for lawyers in your state). The judge is NOT actually the one with the authority to enforce these professional obligations.
Seeing it in TV shows and movies, which often have officers and detectives lying about knowledge, evidence, other witness statements, all to get info, I assumed that it was fictional. In many cases, though not all, it appears to be allowed within limits in real life. See, for example, https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsluka.com/amp/can-the-p....
This doesn't mean all cops are liars, and they still shouldn't commit perjury, but it's an interesting comparison to me. I guess it's a reflection of the advocate/adversary approach that is often a part of the legal process.
I watched the OJ Simpson trial when I was a kid. I was sure he was guilty. I think his lawyers thought so as well. Once they realized the LAPD had tampered with the crime scene and the evidence they used that wedge to open the door for reasonable doubt. And they absolutely hammered at it for months. By the end the jury was full of doubt.
Most public defenders don't have the resources for that kind of defense. And most assume their client is guilty. Which is why plea bargains are prevalent.
First, reality is not important per se, only how the judge and the jury see it. If you know you didn't do something, but there is evidence pointing towards you, and you have a reason to believe that people judging you would be convinced by it... it makes sense to accept a smaller punishment (for something you didn't do) rather than risk years of prison (for something you didn't do).
Second, the process itself is already a punishment. How many times can you be absent from your job because you are at the court, before you lose the job? How much will it cost you to pay for the lawyer, for travel, etc. If you are poor, it can make more sense to accept a smaller punishment for something you didn't do, rather than ruin your life in an attempt to prove your innocence.
"Guilty" people deserve defense. Especially since, as we have seen, neither the police nor the prosecutors are above lying and fabrication.
"This morning the Supreme Court overturned a Louisiana inmate’s death sentence because the inmate’s lawyer – hoping to save his client’s life – had told the jury that the inmate was guilty, even though the inmate had expressly objected to that strategy."
See: https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/05/opinion-analysis-court-ru...
If the defense attorney cannot concede guilt -- but knows client is guilty -- what is he supposed to do?
It's the government's job to establish the guilt of the accused. It is not the defendant's advocate's job to help out. The actual guilt or innocence of their client is not a concern—legally speaking. Ensuring that they get a fair trial, and are afforded all the process due to them is.
A defense attorney will poke whatever holes they find in the state's evidence, in their theory, and in their conduct. They will work to suppress evidence that was gathered illegally, locate witnesses that can testify on behalf of their client, and argue before the jury that the state has not proven their case beyond the legal standard.
I'm sure it's much easier for lawyers when they themselves are convinced of their client's innocence. But when someone comes to you and pays you to advocate for them in court, that's what you do. Your personal opinion is irrelevant.
If we don't require that from the government, the entire justice system breaks down.[1] Because once the government stops being rigorous about its methods for convicting guilty people, it can trivially start convicting innocent people.
[1] Which it largely has, given the ratio of criminal convictions that get plead out, as opposed to being litigated. Plea bargains are a blight upon justice.
Instead, the job is to argue that the prosecutor is not able to prove that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to advocate for his client's best interest, which possibly even includes the client admitting guilt in exchange for a lesser sentence.
The legal system is convoluted enough that it requires a guide and domain-specific expertise. That doesn't mean the public defender's goal is to get them off, simply to serve as that guide and offer them the ability to understand their challenges and options.
Sometimes you're guilty as shit and it's unambiguously on camera, so the defense attorney's job is not to magically get you off -- that ain't gonna happen -- but to ensure you don't get utterly fucked over by a shitty plead deal and/or that mitigating factors are taken into considerations; e.g. "normally offenders with no record who did $crime only got $sentence; why is this twice as high?"
Paul Varjak: Very good. I must say, I’m amazed.
The CA Attorney General at the time said yes. A CA Appeals Court said no.
That wasn't what the AG argued; the AG argued that case shouldn't be dismissed on those grounds. The question is closer to if the prosecutor adds incriminating statements to a confession transcript, is that grounds for dismissal.
> Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General, Michael P. Farrell, Assistant Attorney General, R. Todd Marshall and Larenda R. Delaini, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Appellant. Richard A. Levy, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Respondent.
Source: An attorney told me.
What a great point for lose people reading the article; from the first sentence.