(Untitled)

[cdk]

One component of admission to practice as an attorney is the multiple-choice ethics exam. The best advice I got about this exam was that the people who consistently fail this exam are people who try to pick the most ethical answer; that the goal is to pick the least ethical answer which is still allowed by the rules. This sounds awful to a lot of

Comments

[catbear]

Makes sense. Lawyers aren't supposed to judge, they're supposed to advocate, no?

[mcroft]

I was once on a jury (actually, I wasn't empaneled, but we got this speech as part of the voir dire), and the defense attorney made a point of how we shouldn't judge his client if he tried to impugn the character of the victim, because he had a responsibility to try to suggest anything that might generate doubt in our minds.

My thought was "good luck, buddy, if that's the best defense you have, it's because you don't have a better one."

His client was convicted, and I was not surprised. He had a later court date for solicitation of capital murder for trying to get a jailyard buddy to off the victim as a way of supporting his story that she had other enemies than him...

[cdk]

Wow. Yeah. And I mean... even a guilty person is entitled to a zealous, crappy defense.