Nathan Newman wrote:
>The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center has zero chance of eliciting
such
>a response, and I think it's dangerous for the Left to fit this case into
>the general paradigm of righteous political lawyering.
-Neither is defending mobsters. But that doesn't mean the government
-should eavesdrop on Tony Soprano's lawyer.
I actually said a few times that the eavesdropping was the clearest problem with the whole process here. Don't act like I'm saying what was done in the Lynne Stewart case was acceptable conduct; I'm just saying its a messy enough case that it's the wrong case to make the poster child for civil liberties abuses. There are better cases.
I said:
>The point here is that the best lawyers for those accused of being
>terrorists are people who don't sympathize with their politics.
Doug responded in best cop-baiting manner -That's not for us, or the government, to decide. You're sounding more -like a State Department socialist every day.
Actually, that was a statement of tactics and stategy, both on behalf of the lawyer and the client.
Take this example cited:
>I agree with Doug, Nathan. Your ideas are more and
>more disturbing. Michael Tigar, whose activities
>virtually define what counts as rightesous political
>lawyering, defended Terry Nichols. My own First
>Amendment teacher made his bones, as it were,
>defending the Nazis in the Skokie-Nazi case. My own
>pro bono work largely consists, btw, in trying to get
>manifestly guilty convicted murderers out of jail in
>post-conviction proceedings. jks
Exactly-- you want liberal and/or Jews defending Nazis and militia types, since the message to the public and the jury is that you don't have to like the clients politics to see a principle at stake. The more the lawyer obviously agrees with the clients politics, the less the jury will necessarily easily feel they can separate legal principles from disgust at the clients actions.
You guys are acting like I'm making some bizarro statement, when this is almost by-the-book rules for lawyering. When you have a sexual harassment client, you don't hire a leering playboy lawyer, you hire a female lawyer in the ideal.
Which is all separate from the original issue, which is not who to hire when you've committed a crime, but how to handle lawyers who are involved in ongoing advice to clients who are still involved in the alleged illegal activity. As I said, there is a big difference between lawyers defending someone after the act, and a lawyer involved in ongoing counsel for present-day and future activities.
Nathan Newman