This thread began with a hyperbolic statement that justice and a conviction have nothing to do with each other. A citation to a very bad outcome, namely an innocent man doing a lot of time, was used as an example. My view is that the Masters case showed how injustice can result from the improper use character evidence to prove conduct, you know, the “forbidden inference”. There are very very good reasons for evidentiary rules to prohibit evidence (e.g., disturbing drawings) designed to prove nothing more than the defendant is a bad (or weird) guy from which the prosecutor can argue that the defendant therefore committed the charged crime.

It seems that from the reports about Masters that the sheriff had it in for him. That, my friends, is life. We live in a human world with human frailties. I’m sure the sheriff thought that he was removing from society someone who would kill others. But following time-tested procedures attenuate the effect of people like the sheriff. That’s the point you should be making about Masters, not some rant about how all convictions are suspect because they have nothing to do with justice.

As for “fun”, well, I think that was well-justified in light of other posts. I did not mean to imply that all PDs exult at getting guilty guys off. When someone has such an attitude, which is appalling in its self-indulgence, that person’s views are easy to simply ignore.

I’ll give you guys the last word if you want. I will, of course, concede that there is a lot of incentives for innocent people to plead in our system. Do you guys have any solutions? Maybe mandatory training for prosecutors and police about the phenomenon of false confessions? Maybe making the prosecutor sign an oath when taking a plea that he or she believes that the guy actually did it.

Not guilty doesn’t mean innocent. It means not — proved — guilty — beyond — a — reasonable — doubt. Now that COULD mean the jury decided the person was innocent. But far more likely, the jurors reached a whole range of conclusions ranging from innocent to maybe to probably to I’d-sure-bet-he’s-guilty. It can also include the very common he’s-guilty-but-not-of-the-crime-the-prosecutor-decided-to-go-for.

Your hypothetical is false because it presumes first that defendants only come in two flavors–innocent and guilty, and second, that someone besides the defendant can know for certain which one the defendant is.

But I’ll answer your original question anyway: in my last 10 cases, my record just happens to be pretty close to your hypothetical. Only two convictions (and in one of those, to illustrate my earlier point, the defendant was convicted of less than he was charged with, and was sentenced to less than the plea bargain he’d declined–so what category does he go into? And what category do the hangs go into?). To answer your question, I WOULD IN A HEARTBEAT be willing to have a “record” of 9 losses to avoid having an innocent person convicted. The thought of an innocent person being convicted sickens me, and has kept me awake for days on end during trial. My “record” is irrelevant.

Believe me, you don’t become a public defender so you can get a winning record. And you don’t do it for the “fun” of walking “guilty” people. You do it in order to force the criminal justice system to pay individual attention to an individual defendant, and to force a modicum of procedural protection for that defendant. If at the end of the process, the prosecutor succeeds in proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, you’ve still done your job, no differently than when the prosecutor fails to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

All I have said is (a) a blanket statement that convictions and justice have nothing to do with each other is wildly overbroad and (b) that getting an innocent person off is better than getting a guilty one off.

My larger point is the defense bar should be a repository for good ideas about making the system better, and that means reducing false positives and false negatives. If you don’t want to, fine, but then don’t complain when people take what you have to say with a huge grain of salt.

Personally, I don’t know how anyone with a human conscience can be happy about getting a guilty guy off for a crime with a victim. It’s one thing to have pride in one’s work; quite another to exult in a result that is bad. If someone murdered your child and walked, unless you are a true believer, I doubt seriously that you would like the defense attorneys celebrating the freedom of your child’s killer. Personally, if I defended someone I knew was a killer, and he walked, I wouldn’t be happy at all. I would be sickened. And saddened. And, by the way, I have tried to help killers walk (pro bono habeas and work during law school). I look at it the same way that a military person should look at civilian casualties in time of war–a necessary evil, and nothing to be happy about. I doubt that people reading this blog would find it all that great if some WWII pilot was exulting in all the Japanese kids killed in our air raids. Why then should someone who gets a criminal off who hurt people be happy?

So Long Time PD, be happy with your wins. More power to you. Just don’t whine when legislators ignore you.

An acquittal often also means that some defense lawyer did a good job, which justifiably leads to feelings of happiness and pride for a job well done. I have done plenty of trials where even by the end of it no one really knows what supposedly happened. I have also done a trial or two where I was pretty sure the client was guilty but me and my co-counsel did a good job and the guy walked. And I had no reservations about high fiving my partner when we got back to the office. We did a good, professional job and our client got a great outcome. And I was happy, regardless of what I thought about guilt or innocence.

I always expected to represent those acquitted guys again some day. To date I never have. Hmmm- maybe they weren’t the menaces everyone thought they were. Or maybe they were guilty but appreciated the miraculous second chance and straightened up. Who knows? Who cares? I’m with Saucy Vixen. If I spent all my time hand-wringing about who was really guilty and who was really innocent I would never get anything done. And if one of my acquittals goes on to commit new crimes, it’s not my fault the State didn’t have the proof, ability or will to lock him up the first time around. Of course I would feel bad for the victims if he commits a serious new crime. But if he does, the State will get another shot at him, and maybe they won’t screw it up this time. And, if assigned, I’ll be there to defend him on that one too.

I do not sit in judgment of my clients. I am not the final arbiter who decides guilt or innocence. I do not decide who is “good” and who is “bad,” who “deserves” effective counsel and who does not.

I do my job and it’s not really my concern whether people like me. I just wouldn’t deign to assign labels such as “good” or “bad” to people. That’s part of the reason my representation doesn’t change depending on the perceived guilt or innocence of my client. Call it flip if you want. I call it humane.

End of discussion. Over and out.

Why is it “fun” to win? If the guy’s innocent, then yes, but if he’s not? It’s one thing to do your best for a client–quite another to call it fun when real people are denied justice.

This attitude, I think, explains a lot why people don’t like criminal defense attorneys.

I also didn’t say there was agnoticism regarding specific results. What I said was that I don’t care whether my clients are guilty or innocent. Of course I wanna win. It’s far more fun to win. It just doesn’t happen all that much in my line of work.

The issue I am driving at is “justice” from a systemic standpoint. You feel strongly about the “exclusionary rule”. Me not so much, but we can have a debate about that with the idea of making the system as a whole better, which is, by the way, an aggregation of specific results. I, for one, believe that rules of evidence ought to be followed–there is a ton of good policy behind them, and if that means that evidence is not admissible, that’s what it means. But once again, the idea is to make the system better, which, theoretically anyway, makes for more justice.

So it seems that you are into “justice” on a macro level, and I understand that you have professional obligations, but then we are to believe that there is agnosticism about specific results. That seems odd.

For example: People often lament about evidence being suppressed prior to trial based upon a “technicality.” Last time I looked, the Bill of Rights wasn’t a “technicality.” The Fourth Amendment is not a “technicality.” To allow, for example, evidence to be introduced at trial that was obtained through an illegal search would be to give the government (through its law enforcement officers) carte blanch power to enter and seize whatever they choose from anyone’s home. Hence, draconian sanctions are imposed when they *really* muck it up.

And believe me, that have to REALLY muck it up. Because as time goes by, the Fourth Amendment is eroded more and more, often in the name of safety and security, but always at the cost of infringing upon our civil liberties.

I know that other people have different reasons for becoming public defenders. Some people are far more client-centered than I. When people ask me how I feel about my clients, I explain thusly: I feel pretty much about my clients the way I do about the rest of the world. There are a few I love, a few I hate, but most of ‘em fall somewhere in the middle.

My crusade is not one of moral righteousness insofar as specific individuals and crimes are concerned. The reason I do what I do is because I don’t believe that people should get their rights stepped on and tossed aside just because they’re poor. Because, as I said before, the rights that they have are the same rights we all have. And we can’t very well decide to take away rights from folks on an ad hoc basis just because we don’t like what they did, or because we think they’re guilty of the thing they’ve been charged with.