pretty hilarious really

Wow.

A government that did only what was necessary to protect the community would be a great thing. Idealism is fun, but idealizing the nature of government is naive. Governments are artificial creatures that, regardless of who serves them, seek more power. Their power comes at the expense of human freedom. When a democratic government wants to take your freedom, it convinces you to give it up. If you give a government an inch, it’ll take a mile.

Criminal defense lawyering is about stopping the government from taking that next inch. For some, like Shawn, it’s about playing within the (government’s) rules, making us all more free by making each client more free. Others are playing a higher-level game, trying to back the government up and change the rules.

Railing lunatics or not, all of us defenders are are the perpetual loyal opposition.

How can a community survive without a defense mechanism against those who would harm the community? I wait longingly for the day when our powers of rehabilitation can heal the hurt we cause each other. But until that day, the community must strive to deter that hurt. (I’m not a fan of retribution, but I’ve never been touched by violent crime.) It is, I believe, with this same attitude that the 6th amendment was written. The deliberate infliction of hurt on one of our own by the community is a solemn and necessary thing, not to be taken lightly or handed off to some bureaucrat. The jury panel is a check on government, but that is not all it is. It is a reminder to us that we are ultimately responsible for the actions of our government. Is every sentence fair? Hardly. Given our current situation, are many sentences necessary? I believe so. I find common ground with the opponents of drug laws, piracy laws, sex trade laws, capital punishment laws. But murder, battery, rape, arson, robbery, and their cousins cannot simply be ignored. Defending the accused is perhaps noble and constitutional, but it is not necessary to hate the laws to fill that role.

Freedom, like justice, is in the clouds. It’s a useful ideal, much as peace is an important ideal, but there are just reasons to go to war and just reasons for the members of a community to agree to limit their freedoms. Is it important that we take seriously the degree to which we make that trade-off? Absolutely. But security is a necessary condition for community, and that necessary security we call justice and hope that in her blind scrabbling she acts with fairness and the morality of the community.

I realize that the passions and delusions that drive us can make a difference in our behavior. Instead of the idealized adversarial system that I imagine, I suspect that we have two armies of mostly lunatics railing at one another. I only hope it all comes out in the wash.

Consider this, Colin: every expansion of police power has been argued for by a prosecutor and argued against by a defender. If all of those prosecutors had been libertarian, they wouldn’t have argued for more police power.

If all of those defenders had been authoritarian, however, we would be much less free.

As a defender, I’m not terribly interested in “justice.” In a retributive “justice” system, “justice” is somebody else’s idea of how my client should be punished.

I don’t believe that we humans have enough information to know what justice is, so I’m fighting for freedom.

I think there is a difference between thinking the many facets of the criminal justice system are fair or unfair, and being able to navigate through it successfully.

My personal political beliefs do enter into my defense. So do yours and Greenfield’s and everyone else’s. If they don’t, something is wrong with you. But that fact doesn’t hinder my defense. I’ll put more in a post later. Thanks for getting me all worked up.

And by the way, it’s Fort Worth, not Dallas.