Defense lawyers are necessary to defend the innocent, but when they defend the guilty, the lawyers can appear more corrupt than the guilty.
It is not their legal defense of the guilty that makes certain defense lawyers appear to be corrupt. It is how the lawyers go about defending the guilty that makes the lawyers appear to be corrupt.
Here is an infamous example from the trial of Timothy McVeigh:
“Aren’t we all in some way implicated in his crime?” McVeigh defense lawyer Richard Burr asked McVeigh’s jury.
The correct answer to that question is, “Hell no!”
It is one thing to claim that a person accused of murder is innocent. It is another thing to claim that the people on the person’s jury are accomplices to murder.
A more-recent example of a defense lawyer being sleazy is the 2016 case of Oklahoma’s version of Barney Fife. In that case, the sleazy attorney represented Robert Bates, a reserve deputy sheriff who worked for the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office. Bates had shot and killed a crime suspect who was face down on the ground and controlled by other law officers. Bates hadn’t intended to use his firearm. He thought he was using his Taser instead.
If only Barney had kept that bullet in his shirt pocket, then he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble, but I digress.
Bates was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and received a four-year prison sentence, but not before the defense attorney tried to tamper with the jury. The Tulsa World reports that the defense attorney “tried to elicit testimony from a private investigator who spoke with three Bates trial jurors about purported sentencing confusion. But the judge blocked the testimony from investigator Rodney Baker, saying he had questioned each juror himself on the four-year prison recommendation and that each one answered affirmatively.”
Now we have the 2021 case of Barney Fife’s kin named Kim Potter. She made the same mistake that Barney made.
Potter’s defense team admitted to Potter’s mistake, but the defense team took its defense a step too far:
Defense Team: “Our client had to shoot because the deceased might have went on to harm another law officer.”
In William Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, Part 2, Dick the Butcher jokingly says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
If we can’t kill all the lawyers, then can we at least slap a few of them for their bull?
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