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Confidence to Defend
A lesson of this summer: It takes a lot of confidence to be a public defender. Very often, the odds are against you and you're going to lose. Sometimes your client is actually guilty, sometimes your client will have confessed whether he/she was guilty or not, sometimes the evidence will be so stacked against you that your client's guilt or innocence appears irrelevant. And at all times the state has a formidable array of resources amassed against you — primarily the police with their investigative authority thinking they work for the prosecutors, and the prosecutors themselves, who may have significant advantages via the laws of discovery in your jurisdiction, via their cozy relationship with the police and w/certain judges, and just through the supposed moral force of "representing the interests of the state." If you're a defender, these are the main forces against which you must struggle every day. And that struggle is not done quietly in your office, or via briefs and motions you have the time to write at your liesure. Some of your work will be there, but a great part of your work will be going to court every single day, facing the police, the prosecutors, the judges, complaining witnesses -- all of them (except, theoretically, the judge) there for one reason and one reason alone: To tell you you're just plain wrong. There you stand, just you and your client (and if you're lucky, a witness or two willing to testify on behalf of your client), and your job is to convince a judge or jury that regardless of what all these people are saying, your client should not be punished (or, in some cases, should be punished very little).
If you don't have a lot of confidence in yourself, in your knowledge of the law, in your role as a public defender -- if your confidence in any of these weakens or fails, you will be toast.
Posted August 11, 2004 06:43 AM | 1L summer
AI writes:
"sometimes the evidence will be so stacked against you that your client's guilt or innocence appears irrelevant."
What does that mean? Evidence is evidence of guilt; if evidence of guilt is stacked, presumably guilt is not irrelevant.
Posted by: Yelp at August 12, 2004 01:24 AM
Well, lots of evidence of guilt does not create guilt. That's a bit of a weakness in our criminal justice system. You could have a robbery, for example, where the police show the victim Suspect A and the victim says "that's the guy who stole my purse." And you could have a second witness who says, "yeah, I saw that guy running away from the area." And it could be that Suspect A had some item from the purse in his pocket when he was picked up. That's a lot of evidence of guilt; but the possibility that Suspect A didn't do it still exists. The thing is, in the face of all that evidence, the fact that Suspect A is presumed innocent until proven guilty becomes a bit of a farce.
Also, police are good at getting people to confess to things they didn't do. When your client confesses to something, whether he/she actually did it becomes pretty hard to focus on.
In addition, police and prosecutors sometimes lie and/or stretch the truth and/or conceal/manipulate evidence in order to convict. When that's going on, your client's guilt or evidence aren't really the issue, the police/prosecutor misconduct is the issue (but those can be harder to prove than your client's innocence).
Does that make sense?
Posted by: ambimb at August 12, 2004 05:28 AM
it's pretty naive to think that the only people that get convicted are the ones that actually did it. but that's our system and we're stuck with it.
Posted by: monica at August 12, 2004 07:27 AM
What you seem to be saying is that there are times when the evidence of guilt looks pretty strong but the client nonetheless may be still be innocent. Got it.
Posted by: Yelp at August 12, 2004 06:13 PM
