>Jenny advises anyone charged with a crime not to
>plead, and then adds:
>
>(But
>> I'm not a lawyer and this
>> is not legal advice. You can tell because if I were
>> a lawyer, I'd probably
>> be telling you to take the deal. Cuz, I'd have
>> other clients with worse
>> problems than you. And I'd be really pressed for
>> time. And it's the way things are
>> done. Etc., etc.)
>
>Fuck you. Where the hell do you get off with this
>anti-defense lawyer bullshit?
It's true that lawyers often get blamed for the system (like soldiers get blamed for the war) but I don't think that's what I was doing here. Those things aren't anti-defense lawyer, they reflect the reality experienced by public defenders. And they are exact quotes I and my friends have heard from our lawyers. Good, helpful, political, conscientious lawyers (some of them); public, private, paid and pro bono.
>I am ethically obliged
>to advocate zealously for each client and I take the
>responsibility seriously. whether the client is a
>megacorporation or gangbanging murderer. I would never
>issue cookie cutter advice to plead. That would be a
>violation of my professional responsibility. I would
>never blow off a client because another client has
>worse problems than you. Or because another client
>pays we more money. In considering whether to advise a
>client to plead, I would, and do, explain the stakes,
>the advantages and disadvantages, and look at each
>case individually -- a lot depends on the strength of
>the evidence and the general case against you. Also on
>what you want to do; most people want to stay out of
>jail or minimize their time there, but some people
>have political statements to make, and if that the
>client's goal I help them make their statements.
>Of course I am not an overburdened public defender who
>gets paid practically nothing and with a caseload of
>30 clients who meets them ten minutes before we go
>before the court either, but those people do the best
>they can, and it is a stupid and insulting idea to
>blame the lawyers for that situation.
Yes, they do the best they can, often. Often, 'the best they can' is to plead someone out. I don't think that the public defenders are mostly to blame. It's often true that they have someone who's facing serious time and that they SHOULD put more time into that case than something that carries a year. That choice should not be forced on them. But as a defendent, I have to be able to do what's best for my situation.
>And you know what? I am not an unusually ethical
>lawyer -- most of us take our responsibilities
>seriously. So here's some nonlegal advice for people
>caught in the injustice system: your lawyer is not
>your enemy. Don't trust her or anyone else blindly,
>ask questions, move carefully, but don't swallow this
>poison shit Jenny is ladling out.
Sometimes lawyers are good, sometimes they aren't. I'd say your lawyer CAN be your ally. It's easy to tell oneself "don't trust her blindly." But in practice that's quite difficult because often you ARE operating in the dark. A lot of people get intimidated and feel that since they don't know all the stuff the lawyer knows, they should just do whatever s/he says (I've felt that way). The lawyer is looked on as a savior, more than an advisor. The lawyer-client relationship in a criminal case usually involves an extreme imbalance of information and power, so--as you obviously know--it takes a lot of conscientiousness to compensate for that. It's already stressful to be facing time, so it's hard to make decisions when the stakes are high and the information you do have is spotty, especially to decide _against_ doing what the one person you have in the world (and the expert) says you should do.
The vast number of people who plead out is not simply a reflection of lawyering, it's also a reflection of prosecutorial power (as I noted in an earlier post), but most of those who plead are pleading WITH the advice of their attorneys, who after all are the ones that did the bargaining with the prosecution. To NOT plead out, they'd need to go against the advice of their lawyers. Sometimes this will not be the right thing to do, sometimes it will. It's not anti-lawyer to say that more often than they do, people should go against the advice of their lawyers and hold out for (1) a better deal or (2) trial.
However, I have to say, I find that I am continually enraged by the way SOME PDs and SOME contracted attorneys working for the PD's office just can't seem to find a way to defend working class Black people in my town. It's the big blow-off. It's complete shit. The cops manufacture evidence, the lawyer doesn't even look at it. So while in theory I'm with you on it being 'the system' not the actors, the individual actors are not exactly looking like put-upon martyrs we would hope they would be in this situation. Instead, they're looking like racist collaborators who gently ease people into the maw and through the digestive tract of the prison system. And to hear them tell it, they're doing everyone a huge favor.
Jenny Brown