[ SECRET POST #7077 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #7077 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.




__________________________________________________










02. [SPOILERS for Tiger and Bunny Season 2]




__________________________________________________



03. [SPOILERS for Wrestlemania]




__________________________________________________



04. [SPOILERS for Invincible (TV show) and maybe comics]




__________________________________________________



05. [WARNING for discussion of JKR/transphobia]




__________________________________________________



06. [WARNING for discussion of SA, child abuse]
















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1010.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

06. [WARNING for discussion of SA, child abuse]
https://i.postimg.cc/sDGJSQVw/14.png

Transcript by OP

[fscom]

I watched A LOT of Law and Ordwr SVU, and it's got mt curious. Do criminal defense attorneys in really heinous crimes, like SA or murders or crimes involving children, KNOW that their clients are guilty? Like, is that hard to morally wrestle with, if your job is to get a monster off free? Secret because I know this is a dumb question, and maybe judgemental.

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes they do because of evidence. Sometimes they do because their client tells them. Regardless, their jobs are incredibly important and needed.

[(Anonymous)]

I get it. I believe in due process of the law, everyone deserves a competent legal defense, and defense attorneys play an important role in society. But occasionally there's an especially heinous case where I'm like, how does that person's lawyer sleep at night?

[(Anonymous)]

A defense attorney's job isn't always to make sure their client walks free, but rather to make sure their client--and thereby every person under the law, no matter how much we morally dislike them--gets a fair trial, which may not be that they're found not guilty, but that they're only found guilty of the things that are founded in real evidence. Being thorough ensures we're not condemning people on weak evidence, and it has to work on everyone or it risks working on no one.

[dinogrrl]

^^^ This.
It's not about whether or not their client is guilty, or how they feel about it (and if their clients being guilty of heinous crimes is something they can't handle, they do NOT belong in law). It's about enforcing a standard of convicting via evidence, not hearsay, and making sure EVERYONE who is accused of a crime has a chance to defend themselves.

(Is the system perfect? No. Are there people who cheat it? Absolutely. But it's what we've got, and if someone doesn't fight to keep it, we all lose.)

[sabotabby]

Oh hey, I can answer that. Not a lawyer but related to one who does those kinds of cases.

Yes, sometimes they know, and sometimes they don't. Many cases never go to the sorts of adversarial trials that you see on TV; often it's the lawyers bargaining for a plea deal.

In a case where the defence lawyer's job is to get an obviously guilty client off, it's to maintain broader, universal standards of justice, in which we don't send people to prison on vibes. Everyone deserves a fair trial. In more cases than not, though, it's that everyone deserves a chance at being represented fairly at parole, or to not have their rights taken away in prison, or to have a retrial if the first one was mismanaged.

My relative defends some truly heinous people; however, until they are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, they are entitled to the fairest representation possible and have the same human rights that you or I do, and their job is to ensure that these rights are protected.

Presumably the prosecution also prosecutes some people that they know are innocent, and runs a much higher moral hazard risk by sending someone innocent, or guilty of breaking an unfair law, or who broke a law out of desperate circumstances, to prison. Again, this is the system we have. But it's interesting that we have more shows about heroic cops and prosecutors than we do about heroic defence attorneys.

I'll give you a personal story. When I was 5, a 9-year-old playmate of mine was abducted, raped, and brutally murdered. You can read about it if you want. The cops were sure that they knew who did it, and so everyone else just assumed that this guy was a murderer. The evidence was garbage but vibes, you know? And who wants to defend a child rapist and murderer? So he went to prison.

And. Guess what? He was completely innocent. It was some other guy, who is now dead. The man convicted was exonerated with DNA evidence and they conclusively proved that he had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile he spent nine years of his life that he will never get back in prison, with his reputation tarnished as the worst kind of person imaginable. This is why competent, rational defence lawyers are so important.

[dani_phantasma]

Thank you.

Honestly this is SO important to remind people of. I honestly feel like some people's logic/rationality turns off when they hear about certain crimes. Like I GET the anger. But I've seen emotion based outrage cause people to say the most horrifying things about what SHOULD happen to someone who hasn't even been proven or even someone who had solid evidence proving them innocent but that person didn't think that was good enough.

[(Anonymous)]

In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, "Even a goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel."

[philstar22]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes they aren't trying to get them off, just a lighter sentence. And always, for attorneys, it is about doing a job that is important and protects people's rights. If one person doesn't have them, no one does. If the right to an attorney goes away for the worst person, the innocent person also won't have that right.

Frankly, personally I wouldn't want to be a criminal defense attorney, but I also wouldn't want to be a prosecutor. But I do respect the people who do the jobs, as long as they are doing it properly and correctly (as in, prosecutors who care more about a guilty verdict and a win than justice and are fine with hiding evidence that might show innocence are not good lawyers and I don't respect them).

[(Anonymous)]

Having worked in administration for lawyers, I can tell you they absolutely understand that their client probably did it, but it's their job to argue the case FOR them, not against them.

TBH I also don't understand how someone can just take complete control of their morals and toss them out the window in favor of winning the case for the perp, but that's just my sense of justice and fairness.

[(Anonymous)]

As I understand it (this is all in the case of the ones who have a conscience because yeah sure there are also attorneys who really don't care, as there will always be some people who don't care about others) they're not hoping to win, they're hoping that with all the evidence they have, it will correctly be determined that that evidence isn't satisfactory and that the evidence pointing to guilt will be correctly determined greater.

Like, even if they lose, they still got paid to do their job, so there's no incentive for them to hope their guilty client is found innocent just in order to win.

[philstar22]

This right here. When it comes to criminal, the burden is on the government to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the person is guilty. As it should be. The burden is high for a reason. Criminal attorneys make sure to hold the government to their burden.

There are bad defense attorneys out there for sure. But most of them just believe in the system and that everyone should have the same protections.

[(Anonymous)]

I work in healthcare and sometimes have the feeling of "ugh, why do I have to be patient and polite and help this terrible person," and I don't mean rude people, I mean actual criminals, including child abusers. And the answer is that everyone deserves appropriate healthcare, no matter who they are, otherwise nobody's healthcare is safe. In the same vein, everyone deserves a fair trial and sentence, otherwise nobody's freedom is safe.