Why I will never be a criminal defense lawyer
I’m taking Professional Responsibility this semester. It’s a required class that covers the rules of ethics regarding lawyers in preparation for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam, which everyone has to pass in order to be admitted to the bar.
As in all law school classes, most of the cases and hypos we discuss fall right on the boundaries between rules, where the decisions are most difficult. It’s hard for me to say how often ethical dilemmas like these come up in practice, but for some of these, once in a career is enough to destroy a person.
Yesterday we looked at the case of People v. Belge, in which a lawyer failed to disclose that his client had told him where he’d buried the bodies of his two murder victims. The lawyer had even taken photographs of the bodies, which he destroyed, and used his knowledge of the bodies’ location in plea bargaining. The court found the lawyer not guilty of any criminal charges, and an ethics opinion by the state bar commission found that the lawyer had acted properly.
The kicker is that if he had revealed the location of the buried bodies, the lawyer would have committed an ethical violation of his duty to protect his client’s interests. This duty can get pretty creepy when following it requires a lawyer to do things that most people would consider immoral.
It gets worse when the victim might not be dead yet. If you know that your client’s victim is dying somewhere, and you call an ambulance by a means through which you can be identified (like your cell phone), you’re not representing your client’s interests. Legally, you have a duty to your client and no duty to the victim.
Of course, any decent person would call anyway and deal with the repercussions later. I’d hope a court reviewing the lawyer’s behavior in a case like that would go easy on the sanctions, but there’s no guarantee.
Or consider another real case, McClure v. Thompson, in which a lawyer’s client told him he’d killed a woman. The murderer drew the lawyer a map indicating where he’d hidden the body and the woman’s two children in the woods, but he wasn’t clear (being crazy and all) about whether they were alive or dead. The lawyer, after attempting to use the map in a plea bargain, had his secretary call the police anonymously with the map information, then resigned from the case.
As it turned out, the guy had killed the children in the first place, and he was convicted of all three murders. His habeas appeal for ineffective assistance of counsel was denied (i.e., the court found that the lawyer had fulfilled his duty to the client), not because trying to save the kids was the decent thing to do, but because the lawyer knew that if the kids were found dead, his client would get two extra murder charges, so really (the court found) he was representing his client’s interests after all.
Right result, in my opinion, but what a creepy way to get there, don’t you think?
Any faint twinges of interest I might have had in criminal law have been stomped out. The worst ethical dilemmas we’ve seen in civil cases have involved lawyers refusing to reveal what they believed to be privileged client information, being held in contempt, and spending a day or two in jail. I bet the jails they put lawyers in aren’t even that bad. And transactional lawyers? Psh. Don’t pull any Enron-type stuff, and you’ll be fine.
Tags: criminal law, ethics, law, law school, NaBloPoMo, professional responsibility
