“I am the law…”
I will try to cool it with the Massachusetts politics, but this has me up in arms.
The democratic front-runner, Deval Patrick, is a former US Asst AG for Civil Rights. He got involved in a couple of cases over the years, including one with a rapist who turned out to be guilty (his original appeal was based on the fact that he may have been racially victimized by his jury…which I wouldn’t find shocking), and one where he supported commuting the death sentence of a man who shot and killed a police officer to life in prison. His opponent is now bringing these cases up to show that he’s “soft on crime.”
What really has me over the edge is a campaign ad that Kerry Healey (the opponent) is running on the subject. You can catch it on her website, but the part that set me off was the “Lawyers have a right to defend cop killers…Do we want one as our governor?” Here’s where Margyzr’s head blows apart.
Forget, for the moment, that the ad makes Patrick’s involvement to be more than it was, and forget that it was a death penalty case and the man doesn’t believe in the death penalty (*bias alert* I don’t support the death penalty either). And forget the improper grammar, since as the sentence reads the cop killer would be the governor, not the lawyer. Let’s just talk about that first part, where the Lawyers have the “right” to defend cop killers.
We have an adversarial system. As part of our judicial system (and laid down in the Bill of Rights), every defendant has the right to counsel. Every single one. Even cop killers. Even people who admit to being guilty. The way our system works, we give everyone the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, a lawyer will be provided to you. Lawyers don’t have the “right” to defend cop killers; they have the duty to do so. It’s actually a requirement that a lawyer defends the defendant unless that defendant specifically waives counsel at trial (and most judges are kind of leery of letting folks do that). Further, the lawyer is tasked with doing so to the best of his or her ability.
Just because a person is guilty does not mean that they don’t deserve a fair trial. The point of the first part of the trial is to establish whether you’re guilty or not…under the presumption that you aren’t. The point of the second part of a trial is to determine appropriate sentencing, considering any and all mitigating factors. In both of these, the lawyer’s job is not to prove innocence, but to keep the proceedings fair and to offer assistance in the interest of the defendant.
The message behind the ad is that lawyers have a “right” to defend anyone no matter how heinous, but that they shouldn’t if the lawyer is a good person. Anyone, candidate or no, who espouses this belief a) does not understand the very nature of our judicial system or b) is not actually interested in how our judicial system actually works, only on seeing the probably-guilty punished. Either way, I’d be horrified to have them in charge of a state. (I wonder if she believes that lawyers should defend any of the people in Gitmo…) Apparently, Kerry Healey is all for becoming Judge Dread…prosecutor, judge and executioner.
