So here's the thing- cliches are cliches for a reason. (And I'm going to apologize in advance to any defense attorneys out there that are NOT cut from the same cloth as JB et al.) But people generally think of defense attorneys as tricky, or sleazy, probably because they defend rapists and murderers all day long, so as the saying goes, when you lie down with dogs you get fleas.
What would make someone take up this profession? If there are any defense attorneys out there, I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Do defense attorneys make a significantly more amount of money than a prosecutor? I just can't see why someone would choose this over what would commonly be considered the more satisfying job of locking up and ridding society of child molesters and drug dealers and murderers.
Sure you can say you love the law, and believe in the justice system as a cornerstone of our democracy etc etc, but that's what ANYONE on either side of the fence is going to say; that they want to work to uphold justice in our legal system. What would make somebody choose as their life's work to aid people guilty of crimes against society at large to walk free? I don't mean to sound glib or holier-than-thou, I just genuinely want to know.
I'm a lawyer. Let me say, first, that I consider JB is an embarassment to my profession. In my experience, he is also, thank goodness, an aberration.
I understand that the public perceives the goal of the defense lawyer is to get the client off. A lawyer doing his work, on a day to day business, may not disagree. When the client is innocent, the lawyer achieves his or her goal by seeking the truth. When the client is guilty, the lawyer looks for loopholes in statutes, misconduct by police, prosecutors, and jurors, or errors by judges, and seeks to exploit those things for the client's benefit.
But when we stop to philosophize, we see it from a different perspective. We say that there is a social contract among us by which, for our mutual benefit, we consent to live by certain rules. To accomplish this, we create a government to determine what those rules are, and to enforce them. And we empower our government -- and provide it with enormous resources -- to determine who has violated the rules, and to punish them by depriving them of property, liberty, or -- as in this case -- life, itself.
It is the government, not the lawyer, that has the responsibility of deciding who is deserving of punishment. The lawyer's role is to ensure that the government exercises its power to punish correctly.
Whether innocent or guilty, a client's objective is to avoid being punished. So, when the guilty client is convicted and sentenced, the lawyer "loses". But, despite the loss, the lawyer who did his or her job well achieves the important goal of protecting those of us who are innocent by ensuring that the prosecutor's "win" was fair and square.