Lawyers Should be Indicted (Re: [lbo-talk] Doug Henwood profile

[andie nachgeborenen]

> 
> -And you think this sort of position is something to
> be
> -supported, rather than a civil libertarian's
> horror?
> -What is it that you do at the Brennan Center,
> anyway?
> 
> Don't worry, I don't do criminal justice.  I'm
> mostly working with unions
> and labor folks to criminalize anti-worker behavior
> by firm management and
> shareholders.  And I'd love to see union-busting
> lawyers thrown in jail when
> they advise employers on how to violate the law,
> since it's merely a cost of
> doing business.

Well, Nathan, I'd support the death penalty if I
thought that that high ranking war criminals and
corporate executives who knowingly made exploding cars
would get the needle, not just lumpen-class losers
with darker skin and snoozing attorneys. The point is,
and this applies to your totally hypothetical remark
about the rightness of locking up hypothetical lawyers
who aid and abet terrorists, you know as well as I do
that the  death penalty is not going to be applied to
the richest and most powerful elements in our society.
And you know that union-busting mgt side labor lawyers
who advise their corporate clients to violate the law
because the NLRB is too feeble to do anything about it
are not going to be jailed or indicted or even
disciplined. 

And you also know that the indictment and criminal
prosecution of lawyers who defend politically
unpopular clients (it doesn't matter whether they are
despicable or not) is not going to deter the
nonexistent malfeasance of lawyers who  conspire with
terrorists, because there aren't any. Whatever your
problems with the Guild, we don't do that sort of
stuff, and suggesting that we do is an Ashcroftian
slander. The problem is not to deal with the sort of
conduct you say that such prosecutions could
legitimately punish, and I agree that they could,
because it's merely hypothetical. The problem is the
intended chilling effect on the willingness of lawyers
to represent unpopular clients. Bear in mind that
ordinary criminal defendants are now being prosecuted
under USAPA for domestic terrorism. I do not see why
this isn't totally obvious.

> And I see no civil liberties problem with saying
> that, if it's illegal to
> order an illegal action, it's also illegal to
> knowingly convey that order to
> a third party, knowing it will be executed by that
> third party.
> 
> Frankly, I find the whole left focus on the civil
> liberties of the guilty
> misguided; we have two million people in jail, so
> all the Miranda rules and
> exclusionary rules have done nada to prevent America
> from being a gulag for
> the poor and non-white.  The only limit to
> incarceration has turned out to
> be the budgets of state governments, not legal
> rights.

Yeah, who cares about civil liberties of the guilty,
they're guilty, after all. That's a view I'm familiar
with from the Seventh Circuit. Pay no mind to me, I'm
just a bitter criminal defense lawyer when I'm not
defending large and medium corporations against each
other or the state.

But you still aren't getting it, and I don't know why.
You're a smart guy. You have a Yale law degree and
Berkeley Ph.D. You are incredibly informed about
politics. So I don't see how you  can miss this. We
are not dealing with the usual grousing of the
criminal defense bar about the disappearance of the
Fourth Amendment (prohibiting unreasonable search and
seizure, for nonlawyers) for its guilty clients. It's
another matter entirely.

The civil libertarian concern on the "left" (is there
such a thing?) around the antiterrorist legislation is
about the civil liberties of the _innocent_ -- about
the thousands of people who get swept up in FBI
dragnets and detained indefinitely as material
witnesses without legal representation, about the
government's announced power, actually put into effect
in at least two cases that we know of, to detain US
citizens indefinitely without charges or access to
legal representation, about its power to forfeit the
assets of our organizations on the mere and
unchallengeable listing of them "terrorist"
organization by the Justice Department. 


> I'd far rather see the left focus on compensation
> campaigns for innocents
> wrongly convicted and a campaign to end the drug
> war.


There are a million and two things to be done, and way
too few of us to do them. Some people are working on
these Quixotic projects. As you know. What I don't get
is your talking in ways that suggest that the Quixotic
projects of other people are a waste of time, or
worse. AndI really don't understand your aggressively
arguing, in a way that ignore the real world and the
real world political effect of such arguments, for the
rightness of hypothetical issues like the prosecution
of terrorism abetting lawyers. 

jks



	
		
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