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View submission: The Ethics of Defense Lawyers
Former defense attorney who will echo what others have said - my motivation was defending the constitutional rights of my clients, which the article does touch on:
“A lawyer might personally consider murdering lots of innocent people as abhorrent. However, there may be a superseding reason to defend a client against the state. They might, for example, feel that their client, as an individual person, is deserving of certain rights, no matter their actions. Or they may feel that when compared to the actions taken by the state, which are taken as de facto legitimate, the actions taken by their client are of a lesser degree.”
However, I think the article misses a main point. While people *outside* the profession obviously wonder about the morality of representing a person you know to be guilty, I don’t think most lawyers spend a lot of time thinking about it. It certainly didn’t matter to me - I just did the best I could for my clients within the framework provided to me. And I never felt like other lawyers, prosecutors included, thought less of me for representing someone who’s a total scumbag. To me, it speaks to an incredible, positive legal tradition, in America at least, that we view the right to a defense as so fundamental.
Having said that, I believe criminal defense work does draw certain type of individual. In my own case, it was a distrust of law enforcement not based on anything personal, but as an institution. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good to get someone off for a crime I thought was stupid, or for a cop that I thought was shady. So in short, more than one thing can be true.
There's nothing here!