Norm Pattis was getting a little annoyed with the brethren who felt it necessary to criticize him for representing a cop. Now that it’s over, the time has come to put the question on the table. What’s wrong with defending a cop?
“What’s the matter with you?” The speaker is a good friend and a well-known member of the criminal defense bar. “Why are you representing people like that?”
He was calling into question my representation of a former police officer. The cop was fired from his police force after being videotaped pummeling a man during an arrest. We entered a guilty plea to misdemeanor assault and no jail time last week.
Norm then does what we all do, explaining why he thinks his client isn’t nearly as horrible a person as everyone else does. I can forgive him this delusion, as it’s one of the protection mechanisms we use to keep our sanity knowing that some of our clients aren’t the finest of human beings.
But even if he was the lowest scum of the earth cop, what’s wrong with that?
But here is the rub: I am a lawyer. I know I have choices and that I am not obliged to represent everyone who walks in my door. But I do not draw distinctions between folks accused of crimes. I represent people accused of abusing children, dismembering bodies, burning down homes, robbing banks; why, shocking to some, I even represent police officers. Indeed, this morning when I checked my messages, I see another cop has called. This is an officer I sued for false arrest 12 years ago. I won the case.
We defend people accused of crimes. Some are really bad people. Some are cops. Is there a problem?
Quite frankly, I am troubled by the sporting view of law which pits one “team” against another. One of the reasons I fled Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College, and there were many other reasons, was the cult-like exclusivity of the program: No prosecutors or insurance defense counsel allowed. That’s just plain stupid.
Lawyers are mere ambassadors for other people’s troubles. I don’t have causes that transcend a particular case. When my agenda conflicts with that of my client, I may have a conflict that impedes my representation.
It is indeed a fascinating phenomenon, that some lawyers will happily defend a child molester but refuse to represent a cop who has ruthlessly beaten a child molester. Here’s the rub for me: Neither one sits at the right hand of God, so let’s not pretend that there is anything more righteous on one side then the other. The only sticking point is that personal conscience that may make us incapable of fulfilling our duty to our client, in which case we take a pass on the case. But the pass is personal, not professional. That the defendant is a cop means nothing.
I’ve represented a couple of cops in my time. Not too many, as the business is largely locked up by the PBA with a few “special lawyers.” I’m not one of them. But I’ve never felt the slightest qualm about defending a cop, or befriending a cop frankly, when circumstances were appropriate. The cop is a defendant in need of my services, and he will receive them as I would provide them to any client. Exactly the same.
There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing Norm. Of course, you already know that. So the true believers will think us traitors to the cause again. We’ll survive.
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Perhaps some of the qualms about representing cops are related to the subject of your post from a week ago, titled “Law and Order Wins, And a Boy Is Nearly Stomped to Death,” and highlighting the favorable treatment cops accused of crimes receive relative to the rest of the citizenry. It’s like cops already have the system and unjustified public perception on their side; the strategy of the defender is then likely to be to encourage and aggravate those unjustified perceptions among the jury.
But I wholly agree with your broader point. Philosophically, all presumptions should be against caging human beings. Some human beings really need to be caged, but the presumption should always be against it, and that goes also for bad cops as well as all others sorts of bad people.
The disparity in treatment is what’s galling; the reality that those presumptions are in place for cops but not as strongly in place for others. The defender of the cop would seem to have an easier job than the defender of others accused of crimes, all other things being equal.
I appreciate you not shutting down my lengthy vent in comments the other day about my personal experience with a jury trial last week, which I took as an accommodation for a crushed spirit (and perhaps appropriate as a cautionary tale that fit in with that post). That case involved a black male in the hood who made a split-second decision to fire preemptively at a known serious violent felon who was walking into the defendant’s yard (right up to within a few feet of the defendant) holding a gun and cursing. It’s hard to imagine that if a cop was in a similar situation and made a similar split-second decision that he would not be given the benefit of the doubt and that he would be held criminally responsible. Moreover, cops are presumably trained to deal with such stressful and sudden situations, and should therefore if anything be held to a higher standard than the rest of us rather than a lower standard than the rest of us. So yeah, cops are entitled to a legal defense just like anyone else is. If only all defendants got the same favorable treatment cops seem to get.
You make a very good point, as we are often confronted with the unfairness of how cops are treated so much better than others in the system. And similarly, when they are the defendant, we represent them with as much zeal as anyone else. The answer to the former isn’t to neglect the latter; it really is a form of jealousy that everyone doesn’t receive the benefit of the doubt that is so often given a cop.