It struck me that we tend to post about all the negatives, whether it be judges, prosecutors or cops. And the primary posts elicit comments that drag the story even further down, suggesting increasingly worse, more nefarious conduct and motives by all involved.
Are they all that bad? We need them. We need them all. And not merely for the cynical reason that without cops, prosecutors and judges, we wouldn’t have any job to do and couldn’t earn a living. The same cop who might wrongfully arrest someone today may have saved the life of some child yesterday. There are, as post after post here shows, problems. But that’s not the full story.
We, champions of proportionality and fairness, need to maintain a more even keel. Since I will be teaching at the ITAP program at Cardozo Law School today and tomorrow and won’t be around, I want to make this an open thread for posting about the positive social utility of our system.
There are good cops, prosecutors and judges. There are good things done by cops, prosecutors and judges. No? Let’s try to go positive for once, and let’s bear in mind that there’s something out there that keeps some of our beloved clients from breaking into our homes at night. This is your chance to show that they aren’t one dimensional. And neither are we.
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Thanks! As an avid reader of defense attorney blogs (I’m not in the profession), I have been wanting to ask one of you the same thing. They can’t all be as bad as you portray them, can they?? My family has a heavy law enforcement background, but I’m the nutty one that thinks everyone deserves a good defense. After they are found guilty, I go back to my law and order roots and want severe punishment. Keep writing — I do enjoy the blog. Greg
I think maintaining an “even keel” often promotes both good karma and good lawyering. I “argued” a motion to suppress last Thursday and was able to make it rewarding for my client, myself and even the officer I cross examined.
My goal was to get the officer to say certain things and he ended up saying almost exactly what I needed him to say, not because I “Perry Masoned” (let’s be honest, this almost never happens!) but because I didn’t threaten him or challenge his authority any more than I needed to to win.
Winning to me (and I stole this from one of Spence’s books) is getting what you want and not necessarily rubbing the opponent’s nose in the dirt. So, my closing argument in this motion to suppress the warrantless search of a house wasn’t that some rogue cops blew off the Constitution but that, in the heat of the night and the moment, they inadvertantly went further than the law allowed. I confessed that much of 4th amendment confused me and that I, being fortunate enough to work primarily behind the safety of metal detectors, felt funny “arm chair quarterbacking” people who were making arrests at 3am while I was in bed.
I would have felt like a suckup saying this if I knew this officer to be, like a few of them, a chronic “testiliar”, but I’d never met the guy before and didn’t feel right assuming the worst.
Approaching an “adversarial” motion this way went against most of my training, but since I didn’t take a hostile stance that threatened and created fear, the officer relaxed and said almost exactly what I needed him to say. The motion is under advisement, but everything appeared to go my way.
It’s a little like the adage about not letting the jury see your anger at the other side until there is a basis in evidence to justify it. This approach might not work every time, but it appeared to work that day.
Sometimes hate begets hate and someone has to step up and stop the cycle i guess, at least when it’s not justified.
There are lots of good cops, good prosecutors, and good judges.
Some people need imprisonment.
Is that enough, or do you want me to gush?
There are plenty of people, conditioned to be fearful, gushing uncritical praise of law enforcement and criticism of the defense bar. We are the counterweight. We have to be the ones to count the cost of whatever marginal safety the government provides us.
Whenever defense lawyers want to show their support for the system, the evoke fear: “There’s something out there that keeps some of our beloved clients from breaking into our homes at night.” When we are fearful ourselves, we fall prey to our adversaries’ strongest weapon.
If all the cops were doing was keeping us safe from violent crime, more than half of the cops would be out of work, as would more than half of the prosecutors, criminal judges, and defense bar.
Even so, there’s no evidence that the government actually does a good job of protecting us from violent crime. (People will break into lots of houses tonight, but it’s highly unlikely that anyone will break into mine. Dogs and situational awareness do more to make us safe than the police ever could. Victims are generally people who rely on the police to keep them safe.)
We can only speculate about how safe we would be if we fired all the cops. Arguably, we would be safer, since the war on drugs would come to an end, drugs would be a commodity like coffee, and there would be much less drug-related crime.
Hi, Scott- I think a critical way to have a high percentage of good cops, prosecutors and judges is to reduce their numbers heavily through legalizing marijuana and heavily decrinalizing all other drugs. Then, the selection, training, and supervision process for them can be more successful, rigorous and economical at the same time. My more detailed, and somewhat overlapping, view on this from my blog follows. Thanks. Jon
From Underdog at http://tinyurl.com/39j83p
As in the rest of life, police-suspect confrontations are often shrouded in shades of gray, rather than in clearcut sides of good and evil. Because police are issued weapons, handcuffs and the power of arrest, such power — like any power — is at risk for abuse. This state of affairs calls for a heavy focus on sufficient funds and resources for skilled and successful hiring, retaining, training, constant retraining, supervising, monitoring, evaluating, and firing of police. However, even with such an approach, the risk of abuse of police power remains high until the criminal justice system is substantially overhauled to legalize such activities as marijuana, prostitution, and gambling; to heavily decriminalize drugs; to eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing; to substantially reform the draconian sentencing system and penalties at the state and federal level; to reduce prison and jail populations; to reduce the number of people detained pretrial; to give more teeth to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution; and the list goes on.