Why do defense attorneys defend the guilty

Subscribe to our to get regular updates and fresh resources to help you along in your recycling need. Why do defense attorneys defend the guilty? This is a question that many defense lawyers face from members of the public. Whenever there is a high-profile case that makes headlines, the defense attorney working on the case inevitably faces backlash. Many citizens wonder how anyone could be so callous as to defend a guilty party.

When a lawyer is defending guilty clients, they are not in any way condoning the actions of the clients. A lawyer's job is not to know or decide guilt. The real issue is number two: can the lawyer defend you properly? This is because a lawyer's true duty is to provide you with vigorous defense for the crime of which you're being accused.

For this reason, the most important thing when seeking criminal defense counsel is to find a lawyer who takes their legal responsibility seriously, and will do all they can to mount a thorough defense in your favor.

The answer is two-fold. First, there is a difference between "legal guilt" and "factual guilt. The job of a criminal defense lawyer is to defend you against the charges that are presented. When charges are brought, there only has to be "probable cause" that you might have committed the crime. At trial, the prosecuting lawyer's job is to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that you've committed the crime for which you're being charged.

The government cannot deprive you of your life, liberty, or property until they've established your clear legal guilt. Putting the burden of proof upon the prosecution means the point of trial is all about either proving or failing to prove that you're guilty of the crime that's been charged - not knowing whether or not you're actually guilty.

In court, we distinguish between "factual guilt" and "legal guilt. In some circumstances this can amount of an ethical quandary, but the way the criminal justice system is setup prevents there being an issue on a day to day basis. When a layman asks one of these questions, they are usually talking about a defendant being factually guilty of a crime.

This means all the elements of a crime actually occurred and theoretically are satisfied, this is not the same as legally guilty. In the criminal justice system, all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty through a willing and voluntary plea or the ruling by a finder of fact either a jury in a jury trial or a judge in a bench trial. Conversely, factually innocent defendants are sometimes found guilty falsely, in those circumstances the person is not factually guilty, but legally guilty regardless.

Ethics and morals — while often synonymous — have two different meanings for defense attorneys. Ethics are the strict rules put into place to protect the rights of clients, namely criminal defendants. Morals are the nebulous rules of right and wrong. Many crimes are objectively immoral, but attorney ethics require that those accused factually guilty or factually innocent are afforded a competent and an ethical defense. Defense attorneys are able to represent those accused — even those factually guilty — of immoral crimes because of the importance that every individual have fair treatment under the law.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is not just to punish those who are guilty, but even more importantly to make sure everyone has a fair trial and every opportunity for a competent defense. Don Pumphrey and the firm have years of experience representing defendants every imaginable type of criminal case in Florida. However, when you look into other areas of legal practice, this theory becomes highly problematic.

In particular, lawyers operating in transnational environments work for large corporations and in very diverse contexts where the legal conditions keep changing. When attorneys work in negotiations involving several countries, they may be increasingly beyond the scope of any identifiable rule of law system.

In a way, they are no longer attorneys; they are acting as legislators, as political influencers For this pipeline to happen, the lawyers in this case — led by a law firm based in Texas — brought together the governments of the three countries involved Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia and worked with each of them to draft and sign a separate contract with the BTC consortium as well as an intergovernmental treaty among the three countries, which was drafted by the same lawyers.

The contracts included very controversial aspects such as clauses exempting the companies from basic legal obligations. The problem is that as long as lawyers are working in transnational environments they may be operating beyond the scope of law of any particular legal system. If you look at it from a legal perspective, what these lawyers were doing was the same thing that lawyers working for governments do when they draft international treaties.

They literally created a new domestic and international law within and between the countries involved to make the pipeline possible. They were operating beyond the rule of law.

This is a simplified version of what happened, but imagine that in order to build the pipeline you need to expropriate ground from an indigenous group. As a lawyer, you draft a binding contract where the states commit to not only disregard the interests of the people living there, but also to compensate the companies if they are found liable in a court of law for the damage caused to the indigenous group. This is difficult to justify from a justice point of view. For the amorality theory to work, you need three conditions.

First, there must be a genuine relationship between the lawyer and the client as individuals. Second, that relationship must happen within the context of a litigation process. And third, it must take place within the context of a rule of law. In the BTC case, none of these three conditions were met. As is typical in big commercial law practice, the individual lawyers were part of large law firms working for large transnational corporations.

Rather than having a lawyer and a client talking to each other, you had a complex scenario with many different players, interests and power relations.