Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | January 26, 2009
From a post, The Nature of the Job, last October:
Clients sometimes think that they want a lawyer who will act unethically for them, but they don’t: first, because a defense based on lies is almost always doomed to fail; and second, because clients need lawyers they can trust. Unethical lawyers are . . . unethical. [...]
Mark Bennett | February 28, 2008
The world of the New York criminal defense lawyer is very different from that of the Houston criminal defense lawyer; these differences go deeper than just the much greater number of cases that Texas lawyers try to juries. Scott Greenfield, writes about the plea offers mailed to 60 of the 62 alleged Gambino defendants in [...]
Mark Bennett | December 21, 2007
Something that should cheer those who hold that “The Sun rises and falls on the sole question of the client’s interest” and feel that “if serving the client harms another, so be it” . . . .
Here, if the federal government is to be believed, is a lawyer who doesn’t just pay lip service to [...]
Mark Bennett | November 2, 2007
Norm Pattis writes about lawyers who won’t help people snitch (hat tip to Scott Greenfield); he draws an analogy to the practice of medicine:
I would not consider myself well served by my doctor if he were to announce that a life-saving treatment was available, but that he would not prescribe it because, well, it offends [...]
Mark Bennett | October 27, 2007
I have written a couple of times about a lawyer taking the position that he will not help criminal defendants cooperate with the government in exchange for the possibility of lighter sentences. My contention is that a lawyer who feels that cooperating with the government in exchange for a possible sentence reduction is unethical should, [...]
Mark Bennett | October 25, 2007
Here is what I now put in my contracts on federal cases. (I cribbed it from another lawyer who has had the no-snitches policy for a long time.):
I do not represent people who “snitch,” “rat,” or cooperate, which means giving information against others to the government in order to avoid criminal charges, receive leniency, or [...]
Mark Bennett | July 6, 2007
(I promised, on reading SHG’s 231 Years and Still Trying, to write about the nature of freedom, the power of fear, and the abandonment of American Ideals. This is the first post in the series, though it covers the third topic.)
When I was growing up, my dad worked for the CIA. I was curious about [...]
