4411

100% agree. Trivializing something as serious and life-impacting as rape is a purposefully harmful act. The desired end doesn’t justify the means here.

4412

There seems to be a crapton of misunderstanding going on.
Until rowe33’s post of fuck her, I’d never heard of the woman before in my life. I’m not defending HER. I’m defending that people accused of crimes should be able to hire competent attorneys.

4413

Again, it sounds like some of you are attacking her personally for being shitty and conflating that into hatred for all private defense attorneys.

I have no issue with attacking her for her public comments. She sounds like an awful person. I do have a problem with the premise that all non-public defense attorneys are scum for collecting a bigger check than the govt will offer.

So, to answer your question, Kellyanne Conway is a turd. Not all previous White House PR flunkies are turds.

4414

And really there’s only one reason a defense attorney does pre-verdict interviews and says something like this: to influence the jury.

4415

I hear you, and understand why it felt that way. I am just saying your first post was incomplete and kind of out of nowhere, but your clarifying post about your post made it super, super clear, to me, what you were unhappy with, and I agreed at that point.

4416

Same.

4417

Then we’re definitely agreed. Just to be clear, I think defense lawyers serve a very necessary and important function in society. But I feel there’s a wrong and right way to do that job. And when you pick and choose your clients, I feel that choice says a lot about you as a person.

4418

I agree with this.

Maybe not this.

I mean the worst scum in the world deserves a defense, and I am not sure the only way to properly defend scum is through forced assignment. I think that’s part of the issue with less fortunate scum, that and money.

She does not have to say those things to defend him though. That’s a choice she is making, and it makes her a bad person because of what she said… not due to her defense of him. What she does in the court is… different than what she says outside of that. In the court room, that’s her job.

4419

In our legal system, everyone deserves counsel. There’s no reason to attack an attorney for representing a piece of shit.

4420

Curious, how do you think a public defender should/could have handled the case. None of those arguments?

4421

I’m not sure as I’m not lawyer. But I’m not a fan of making shit up to get a client off. Attacking the victims or rape victims in general isn’t an ethical thing to do just because it helps your cause.

4422

I just went and clarified this for any future readers. But I still don’t see why people are assuming I’m attacking defense lawyers and not this particular woman. I said ‘fuck her’, not defense lawyers. She’s a terrible person.

4423

As a lawyer, you are ethically bound to do everything you can to get your client off. It’s her job.

Now, there are standards of conduct that lawyers are held to, but I don’t believe that she stepped outside those standards.

Doing things like attacking the witnesses who are claiming your client committed crimes? That’s absolutely within the bounds of what a defense lawyer should do. Because they could be lying. They could be malicious. A defense lawyer is a legal advocate for their client.

And our system depends upon being able to secure legal representation, even in cases where everyone thinks you committed a horrific crime.

Because otherwise, if we condemn a lawyer for representing a terrible person, then we make it so that the mob decides who is guilty and who is innocent, since lawyers will not want to jeopardize their own reputation by taking certain cases, even though those defendants have not had their guilt established through due process.

4424

This is a fair point, and I would agree in many cases, but saying bullshit in the news like “Well I wouldn’t be assaulted because I would never be in that position” goes well beyond providing an ethical legal defense. It’s just making shit up to influence the jury and cast a shadow on every rape victim. “She dressed too much like a slut”, “She agreed to go his home”, “She drank too much” - it’s all the same line of bullshit that certain folks have been saying for years.

And if someone swipes right on an app, agrees to meet with a guy, then changes their mind and doesn’t want to have sex, the guy does not get to have consensual sex at that point. I simply can’t agree that a lawyer that would spew that nonsense is in any way an ethical non-shitty person.

4425

Here is another way to look at it.

She did all that, and he’s still going to go prison. This is the best case.

His lawyer needed do as much as they could, so we could still send his ass to prison and know it was legal and right to do. We did not want this guy to get off due to some sort of weak defense claim. How we get to a place, as a society, where a rape victim isn’t re-victmized on a stand? I don’t know. MeToo is a huge part of that, not just pushing acts into the criminal system but trying to make society aware and fix some of these problems, together. We have a lot of people who victimized people, vanished for a few months, and then returned feeling entitled to just live their lives as per usual again. This is one of the few that actually went to court.

4426

Yep. If she held back, then it means Weinstein could use that as a basis for appeal or dismissal as I understand it. Now if he needs to dig for something a lot more arcane and less likely to work.

4427

Ethically I get that. But that’s her job, no matter what crime her client is charged with to question the validity of witnesses, question motives, question every bit of evidence submitted by the prosecution. If we proscribe every defendant in every trial guilty and not allowed to call into question witness testimony, we might as well not have a trial at all. We can do it Klingon style.

4428

There’s also a distinction to be made between what she says in the courtroom and what she says to the press. I’m not sure I get the ‘influencing the jury’ thing with those remarks.

4429

What’s not to get? Jurists who are not sequestered watch TV and read the news just like everyone else.

Why else would a defense attorney do interviews?

4430

Yeah, a really good attorney understands that swaying public opinion in a high-profile case is part of setting up their case. Prosecutors do this too.