I bet each field has their favorite words to abuse. In mathematics, it's "normal" this and "normal" that, with it almost certainly guaranteed that something "normal" in one branch is *not* related to something "normal" in another. And "regular" is close behind ....
Something I read once: "What most of us end up seeing and believing is that the lawyer's job consists of, not the provision of the best possible defense that the accused can get nor the pursuit of justice, but using as many technicalities and loopholes as possible to have the case so narrowly defined that it becomes nothing more than a big game between the prosecution and the defense, with the judge not as the impartial facilitator, but as the referee of a boxing match. When evidence is ruled inadmissible, when there are seemingly endless delays, when obviously guilty defendants go free, most of us can't perceive this as justice, but as legal maneuvering. And lawyers are at the forefront of launching appeals to overturn convictions and having precedents interpreted so narrowly or so broadly that they seem unrecognizable. We want a justice system, but what we have is a legal system; and lawyers are the agents who prevent it by making sure that Lady Justice 'can't see the forest for the trees.' "
Legal does not mean just nor fair, only that something is of or pertains to law. Notice how they don't make illegal writing pads? Or as someone once told me, Ill-Eagle is a sick bird.
The basis for a lot of legal maneuvering in criminal cases is that no matter how bad the individual's crime, it's much worse if the government commits a crime in order to obtain evidence.
"A big game between the prosecution and the defense" It's actually even worse. Not even a game, more like a play where the stars write the script up amongst themselves and take turns switching roles while the audience sits there mute. The system is so oversaturated with caseload that prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges are all aware that they are on the same team: the team of order, "the legal system". The game encourages them to screw each other, but they NEVER screw the system, because it's what pays their bills and justifies their existences. ALL of them. Put a Judge, a D.A. and a defense attorney in the same room for long enough and they'll all agree that the real enemy is not crime itself - it's anything that might drain the money and power out of their industry.
There's the story about the criminal defense attorney who when asked how many guilty people's he's defended says "Zero, I don't do appeals cases, all my clients are innocent until the end of the case."
There's an interesting interpretation of "innocent until proven guilty ". I never thought about how far that goes. I would say that at appeal the burden of proof shifts to the defense if found guilty at trial.
@@samjordan8800 Yes there is. And THAT is why you will NEVER see a verdict of "Innocent." The only two verdicts allowed from a Court are, "Guilty, " and "Not Guilty."
It's a good thing to have Ethics 101 as the first class in law school. Sometimes I wonder if it should be required to have a refresher course every so often... Edit: Especially for prosecuting attorneys.
On a related note, we all know it is illegal to lie to investigators like the police or FBI. Yet for some reason those same people are allowed to lie to those they are investigating. Why is that? Steve, perhaps you could do a show on why members of law enforcement are allowed to do what the people they are interrogating are not. I can provide examples if you need.
Well the fact is all you hafto say is I'm not answering that! Lawyer, Lawyer, Lawyer! You do not hafto answer anything in an interrogation or even in court! In court you can take the 5th!
Dear Mr.Letho. THANK YOU. You make me smile. THANK YOU again.Do most people with common sense not know that when we are honest with you. You benefit us better.Honesty is my only policy.THANK YOU ❤
Excellent examples. Above and beyond. That was fun. For some odd reason reminds me of your mechanic story tasked with rotating the elders pristine caddies tires. When a block or two down the wheel came off and passed them down the street. The mechanic said that he had done the rotation, but didn't see any order to tighten the lugs.
I dated a lawyer. I remember being with a group of her fellow lawyer friends one time as they were talking about other lawyers. One of the first characteristics they discussed about other lawyers was whether or not they were ethical.
You have demonstrated why law school takes so long to complete. There are very few short answers to the law and you must be trained to examine every action from every aspect. Like a Chess master , you consider every move and counter move.
Good question with one lawyer in the room, great question with 100 lawyers in the room. Also: missed opportunity for a guest politician lawyer to join the episode.
I had an attorney, public defender, when I was younger, that is a very prominent attorney today in our community. She was assigned my case, and through our interview, she came up with a story that I could use that would put doubt in the jurors minds. I was 14 at the time. It was a criminal case. She must have missed that ethics course, or thought I was hot. But it helped, and I was found not guilty.
That sounds more like the tactics of a prosecutor. They develop "a theory of the case" and then elicit testimony from 'witnesses" to sell it. It's more about imagination than fact. That's not to say that defendants are necessarily innocent,but they are, more often than not, over charged. And yes that term is a thing.
Enjoy this channel very much. My own situation isn't the accused lying, but the ethics of the attorney was in question. Texas Gulf coast. A family member had an altercation with a neighbor and was charged with Class A with bodily injury. We hired a defense attorney, paid his retainer. This went on for more than a few months and a few court appearances which were rescheduled by the prosecution. The attorney approached us with a plea bargain, which was no bargain. When it became clear that the DA wanted to go to trial, we found out that the plea bargain was what our attorney was proposing, not the DA. This included months of jail, apology letter, etc... in a case that we felt was a self defense case. At this time the DA ramped up the charge to Felony. At this point our attorney called us to his office removing himself from our case because he was appointed a judge in the city the altercation occurred and it would be a conflict of interest that he would be called to question police officers. We got another attorney, paid a new retainer and went to trial. They released the jury for deliberations, they also added the lesser charge of Class A. No felony, but we did get the Class A. This is the issue. I looked at the appointment of the first attorney and he was appointed long before he took our case and should have recused himself and not taken our case. I sued him in small claims court for the amount of the retainer and no surprise he won in that the Judge ruled we paid for the work he put into the case. Two things, he was pushing a jail time, and other things that in the end didn't have to do. We would not have seen jail even with the felony we're told as first time offender with no history. The second was the attorney new he could not go to trial and that is always a likelihood, so he took our case and retainer and wouldn't have been able to represent us properly. This all happened 10 years ago. We then had a civil case and we came out ok there to. We didn't take it any further, but felt the ethics of the lawyer was lacking. Take care
That's the problem; the first class is ethics, so it's the first forgotten! (I worked for a literal criminal of a lawyer; he was permanently disbarred, died at a young age.)
Each attorney has to take an ethics test before they take the Bar… So they have to keep on top of that… Dirtbags are gunna be dirtbags regardless of profession. 🤷🏻♂️
7:26 Heh, heh-heh heh, heeh. Trio of chuckles...I love it! Love your videos Mr. Lehto, If you had a twenty-minute video on how a clothes pin worked....I'd watch it! (and I'd click the "like" button).
Chatting with a public defender I enquired as to how he defended an obviously guilty defendant without suborning perjury. He answered that he never asked about guilt but would spell out the case against them and ask, "how are we going to defend against this".
I have always thought that a lawyer was there to help a wrongly accused person defend themselves against charges that are not valid, and not to persuade a jury that a guilty person is not guilty. It is in everyone's interest to have people who commit a crime are somehow punished for it and also, to uncover prosecutors and police who may fabricate evidence to convict someone they don't like (why they do this I don't understand, but it does happen).
Thank you for another great law video. So a lawyer can and will defend a client he believes is guilty to give him his due process under the law. I guess this is possible because a lawyer doesn't have to prove his client is innocent, he just has to have a reasonable response to the accusations, thereby remaining at arm's length from the truth, so to speak.
Everybody deserves a fair trial. Someone could be guilty and still deserves a chance to speak up for themselves, if there is anything good in their favor. Then the judge weighs the evidence and hands them just as stiff a jolt as they deserve. You could think of a million examples. Here is one. A man is accused of stealing a car. He tells the judge, yes I took the car. My wife was having a baby and I had to rush her to the hospital. At the time I felt I had no other choice. I'm sorry I inconvenienced the owner but I brought it back right away. The judge says, I find you guilty of stealing a car. I have looked at your record and you never stole anything before and never got in trouble before. Therefore I am not going to send you to prison, I am putting you on probation for a year and I sentence you to do 100 hours of community service. And I warn you to go carefully because if you get in trouble in the next year it will go hard on you. So the accused was guilty but he deserved a chance to speak up in his favor and the judge recognized that. I think that makes sense.
A friend of mine is a criminal defense attorney who has represented murders, drug trafficker's, etc. When people would ask him "How he can you get these really terrible people off?", he would say the following: 1. Just because someone broke the law doesn't make someone guilty, If someone breaks the law they are guilty until the police and state attorney do their jobs and a jury say so. 2. If you do something and the police and state attorney do their jobs, the jury is going to find you guilty and there's nothing I can do for you except ask the judge to give you a room with a view. He then said "That's why I do what I do and why it's important."
My very dishonest aunt once bragged about how her attorney could win any case by continually intentionally delaying it on every minor detail. To the point the prosecution and court would either give up or get so frustrated they would make mistakes causing the case to be thrown out. Is this really something an attorney can get away with?
A more difficult question, I think, is what happens if the client lies on the stand, the lawyer has good reason to think that it is a lie, but the lawyer did not know in advance that the client was going to lie.
This is common practice in Cook County, Illinois. Those attorneys have no ethics what so ever, even some judges go out to lunch with defense attorneys. The attorneys give their clients lies to tell on the stand
Steve, I have done immigration law. In many jurisdictions it is a criminal offence to *assist* someone, either knowingly or by negligence, to make an application based on false representations. However, equally, the rules which we operated on stated that we could not refuse to provide work done - if a client demanded it - whether they had paid us or not (I know, no lien, crazy). For us, this meant that we would (occasionally) run into regulatory complaints when the evidence showed that the person lived in one city, and they had claimed to us, for their application, that they lived somewhere (with someone else who they were basing their immigration on) which their bank statements (for example) clearly demonstrated they did not live at. (simply put, they would say they lived in the north of england and all their bank transactions, for 5 years, would show not a single transaction outside of london or on the motorway or long distance coach or train tickets). In these instances, we simply refused to supply, accepted a regulatory complaint for refusal to provide the file, and would argue with the regulator that we could not lawfully comply.
You spoke at length about Perjury. My issue would be, what if you are a court appointed attorney and the client tells you outright I committed the murders, I planned them out meticulously and am fully aware of what I have done and feel no remorse or guilt. How do you proceed to represent them ethically since your job is to keep them from or at least reduce jail time. The law states that EVERY person accused has the right to be represented. How do you proceed forward? Do you simply advise the to go for a Mental Instability defense? (Obviously someone who commits heinous acts deliberately with no emotional response to them MUST have issues).
Decades ago I asked my TAX attorney the same hypothetical question. He answered it in about 1 min.! In essence, an attorney cannot participate in perpetrating a fraud upon the court. Then what if the client insisted on testifying falsely? If the attorney cannot withdraw, he cannot participate by asking questions of the client on the stand. I would think that he couldn't even properly call the client to the stand. But that's my own addition.
The very first thing I thought of when I saw the title of this video is the very last point that you brought up just before closing it out, and that it isn't necessisarily a defense attorney's job to get an acquittal for their client, and that they don't have to believe their client either. A defense attorney's main job is to "defend" their client from any number of onslaughts likely to come their way, the most likely of which is themselves. "If you sit down, shut up, and do what I tell you to do, there's a pretty decent chance that I might just be able to get you out of here in 20 years, maybe 17 or 18 if you take a job and behave yourself while you're up." The next most likely threat is from the system to chew them up and shit out the other end. Again, it still isn't always about getting an acquittal, it's just to protect them from the system and assure that regardless of their obvious guilt, they still get a fair trial, and not just crammed through the system to the point that even showing up for court is just a formality.
We deal with the same thing in the Real Estate industry. Whether you’re an agent or a loan officer the first and last thing that we tell trainees is, "Do not break the law." Every now and then we'll get a client who offers to have their paystubs "edited" to help them qualify for the loan. Or they may tell us that they can get other documents forged. And we have to inform them that not only is this illegal, but at some point the validity of the information is going to be checked and verified.
I was on a jury in criminal case. The defendant took the stand and lied about how the rifle was pointed when he fired it. One of the jurors of his height actually held the rifle the way the defendant said he did. It was not even close to matching the angle of the bullet holes left in two buildings and one truck. We jurors knew he lied from the physical evidence presented. Guilty verdict PDQ.
Our system of jurisprudence in which we meticulously and fairly empanel 12 good men and true to hear all pertinent evidence necessary to decide who has the best attorney.....
A former student of mine became a lawyer up in Canada. I asked him if as a lawyer he could suggest various wild theories as to how a crime occurred in an attempt to muddy the waters surrounding his client. He told me that he is not allowed to lead evidence that he knows is not true. Yet I am sure we have all seen many real lawyers on TV (real lawyers not TV shows) doing this. Is there some fine line that they are skirting or are they just outright breaking the rules? Thanks
Fantastic Finnish flag t-shirt! I used to do volunteer work for my local cat shelter, including PSAs that aired on the radio for fundraising events (some of which I organised!). I never had a dog growing up cos I was badly allergic, but I have to admit I am a cat person through and through. That being said, I fully support rescue efforts and humane shelters of all kinds.
Surely this doesn't include family law where the attorneys are usually dirty and suggest that the woman lie about her spouse's behavior and domestic abuse for a more favorable result.
@@margaretstoner4701 ❣" NEED more people like him ❣{ check out Katie Porter on RU-vid she knows how to ROADBLOCK EVASIVENESS!!} 🍎 (scroll down her videos )
To me, the much greater question: Why are prosecutors almost never held accountable for deliberately misleading the court (hiding, destroying, or even manufacturing evidence) to convict an innocent person? Theoretically it shouldn't happen... but what do we think will happen when there are high rewards for getting a lot of convictions - and only a minuscule risk of being punished, virtually none while still in power?
*BLESS YOU STEVE!!!* My ex *DID NOT* want to comply with *ANY OF THE ETHICAL CONDUCT NOR LAWFUL CONDUCT RULES* when the idiot decided the thing to do was file *11 FALSE CHARGES* against me, *THEN INSIST THEIR LEGAL AID ATTORNEY PRESENT THEM TO THE COURT WITH ZERO EVIDENCE ON ANY LEVEL!!!* That poor lawyer got into such heated screaming matches with the ex, that the court decided to sequester them into a consultation room with a guard outside the door, because they were sooooooo loud, they became a disruption for the ENTIRE FLOOR!!! It should be noted the the ex is a diagnosed psychopathic covert NARCISSIST who had zero intention of backing down... My lawyer FORCED the production of ANY evidence to validate any of the charges BEFORE anything could proceed (back to your Ethics & Lawful Procedure Rules), & their entire case collapsed on itself- the entirety was forced OUT of the court & all 11 charges were withdrawn... That legal aid lawyer *BURNED THE RUBBER SOLES OFF HIS SHOES* he ran so fast to formally hand the court his *RESIGNATION* of Council on the case, telling my lawyer... "They are ABSOLUTELY *NUTS!!!* I rest my case... 💜
Dear Steve...ETHIC'S..THANK YOU! If I hired a defense lawyer...i would tell my lawyer..the truth...the whole truth..and nothing but the truth! SO HELP ME GOD ❤
Steve, have you ever represented a client in a criminal case in which the defendant was actually innocent? What was the outcome? We'd love to hear that story.
A good movie based on this topic is "The Devil's Advocate". When Keanu Reeves knew his client was guilty and still went ahead and defended him, it set off a whole string of events where he was going to be the father of the anti-christ haha. But he got a second chance (most likely from God) and then decided to not represent the guy. Great movie. Al Pacino was a great Lucifer.
A lawyer can defend a guilty client .The prosecution has to make its case. I have heard that if a lawyer knows for sure a client is guilty, the lawyer is not allowed to say the client is innocent; however, the lawyer may argue that there is reasonable doubt. Another question. Is that true.
My humble personal opinion: If you know your client is guilty or intends to commit perjury, either convince them to take a plea deal in criminal cases or to settle in civil cases. If they refuse, drop them as a client or withdrawal. However if you merely suspect your client is guilty or may commit perjury when called to the stand, the best thing you can do is either prevent them from testifying as much as possible and tell them to plead the fifth.
I think the question is more about if they say things on the stand you know to be false based on their confidential testimony but they didn't tell you ahead of time that they planned to lie.
"Rumpole of the Baily" (British barrister TV show) had a dilemma like this once. His client was trying to admit to him what they had done, and Rumpole kept trying to shut him up. Once his client told him the truth, he had to withdraw. Did not end well for the client.
What happens if you know your client committed a crime, he admitted to it, and someone else has already been found guilty of that crime and is serving time in prison for it?
Here's another interesting question on that. Say your perjury hypothetical is the case and this particular lawyer sticks to certain morals: Lawyer requests to withdraw - Court/judge orders him not to/tells him no - Lawyer then refuses the courts order and withdraws anyways with a new explanation/statement of: I am retiring from practicing criminal defense law (I.E. Lawyer immediately decides they are done with those types of cases and will only do contract law etc... in the future).
I bet such clients underestimate the courtroom. There, a judge sits above you. An armed bailiff stands there openly. A dozen jurors stare at you intently. Smart attorneys, who likely expected you to try that, ready their prepared examination.. It ain't your living room. If you think you can commit perjury convincingly there, you're dreaming. Your guilty demeanor will make it worse.
A Lawyer may defend a person guilty of a Crime, going against existent Law. Neverthless, always within the bounderies of Ethics. For instances, in the (relatively) Old South, Law could state : "A Black person must seat in the rear of the bus". An easy, clear exemple to place on the table. And the person declined to move into the designated area, ignoring Police instructions. Being charged .with ignoring transportation Law and a Police Officer's orders, resisting arrest, etc. In sum, defending a person against unfair and unconstitutional Laws it's not easy -- and "ain't " cheap. In material and figurative terms.
You make a point that the first class you took was ethics. Unfortunately, in reality, I think the functional way to view this is 'For graduates/practicing lawyers, Ethics was so long ago I've forgotten it'
