The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.
TECHNICALITY, n. In an English court a man named Home was tried for slander in having accused his neighbor of murder. His exact words were: "Sir Thomas Holt hath taken a cleaver and stricken his cook upon the head, so that one side of the head fell upon one shoulder and the other side upon the other shoulder. " The defendant was acquitted by instruction of the court, the learned judges holding that the words did not charge murder, for they did not affirm the death of the cook, that being only an inference.
Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering. . . since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.
Nearly every lawsuit is an insult to the intelligence of both plaintiff and defendant.
Today, it's not the same playing field as when I first became a lawyer in 1977, where the government had been restricted by our wonderful Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren's court rulings. Now it's all going the other way, the flow is against the defendant, against anything that could really help a client. But you still fight it, you do what you can do. It's all there is.
The higher someone's profile, the easier it is for a defendant to trade him up to the feds. Mr. Big is always a better catch than Mr. Small.
When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society.
