Criminal Defense Attorney Quotes
We, as criminal defense lawyers, are forced to deal with some of the. lowest people on earth, people who have no sense of right and wrong, people who will lie in court to get what they want, people who do not care who gets hurt in the process. It is our job -- our sworn duty –
as criminal defense lawyers, to protect our clients from those people."
- Cynthia Rosenberry.
But defense counsel has no comparable obligation to ascertain or present the truth. Our system assigns him a different mission. He must be and is interested in preventing the conviction of the innocent, but, absent a voluntary plea of guilty, we also insist that he defend his client whether he is innocent or guilty. The State has the obligation to present the evidence. Defense counsel need present nothing, even if he knows what the truth is. He need not furnish any witnesses to the police, or reveal any confidences of his client, or furnish any other information to help the prosecution's case. If he can confuse a witness, even a truthful one, or make him appear at a disadvantage, unsure or indecisive, that will be his normal course. Our interest in not convicting the innocent permits counsel to put the State to its proof, to put the State's case in the worst possible light, regardless of what he thinks or knows to be the truth. Undoubtedly there are some limits which defense counsel must observe but more often than not, defense counsel will cross-examine a prosecution witness, and impeach him if he can, even if he thinks the witness is telling the truth, just as he will attempt to destroy a witness who he thinks is lying. In this respect, as part of our modified adversary system and as part of the duty imposed on the most honorable defense counsel, we countenance or require conduct which in many instances has little, if any, relation to the search for truth.
Mr. Justice White, United States v. Wade
Another point of view, expressed by Lord Henry Brougham, appropriate to the direction this discussion has taken:
“An advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, amongst them, to himself, is his first and only duty; and in performing this duty he must not regard the alarm, the torments, the destruction which he may bring upon others. Separating the duty of a patriot from that of an advocate, he must go on reckless of consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion.”
"I am an advocate because I understand that while you may be able to guarantee that you won’t commit a crime, you can’t guarantee that you won’t be charged with a crime. And if you were charged with a crime, or if your mother, father, sister or brother were charged with a crime, wouldn’t you want every protection afforded you by the Constitution? Or would you feel that you had too many rights? And if you stood wrongly arrested, whois the victim then?"-The Great Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr.