The good attorney-bad client problem
I admire effective lawyers. Usually. But when the lawyer is representing an evildoer, sometimes it's hard.
Take Steve Houze, the Portland defense lawyer, for example. He's good, and I mean really good, at getting lenient punishment, or none at all, for heinous criminals who can afford to hire him. I respect his skills, and his clients' rights to good representation, but there are times when I wonder whether the world wouldn't be a better place without him.
Another example was in the news this week. A lawyer in the Portland city attorney's office was roasted by critics for her work fighting disclosure of public records. A gifted lawyer, but with a terrible client, the City of Portland. She's good at what she does, but what she does is for a bad cause, on behalf of a collection of arrogant jerks.
It's probably wrong on my part, but I cut her even less slack because she's in-house counsel, as opposed to a freelancer like Houze. The bad client is her only client, and that makes it seem worse somehow.
Another subconscious prejudice on my part may be that she's a government lawyer, as opposed to a private one. Deep in the recesses of my mind, people who live on the taxpayers' money may start with a strike against them.
It's a little late in the game for me to be brooding about this sort of thing. But if the client is bad, can the lawyer still be good? After a while, doesn't the bad rub off? As a friend of mine once put it, "If you put a clean shirt and a dirty shirt in a bag together and shake the bag up? The dirty shirt don't get clean."
There will always be sleazy lawyers. There will always be skilled people lacking a moral compass. What baffles me is how we have a justice system that gives such deference to legal chops of the kind Houze has. At some point, good lawyer or bad lawyers, trespassing is trespassing, a DUI is a DUI, and groping a 13-year-old on an airplane, to cite a case Houze has been defense for, is just that. Sure, I don't fully understand how the evidence for any of those crimes is processed and I'm sure for a good bunch of those case a good lawyer can rightfully punch a hole in the procedural stuff, the evidence-gathering, etc. But the fact that a good number of these guys can make lifelong careers out of successfully exonerating so many of these people leaves me puzzled.
ReplyDeleteI don't think good defense lawyers exonerate people. They are striving to get the best result under the circumstances. A lesser sentence is not exoneration.
ReplyDeleteBut it isn't justice, either.
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