Our entire system is built on both the prosecution and defense having a competent lawyer. You get dumb shit like mistrials if the defense attorney is incompetent.
Defending the obviously guilty is essential.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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The purpose of a defender for an obviously guilty person is to make sure that all of the rules of law are followed during the prosecution so that the criminal does not have an opportunity to attempt to overthrow the court proceedings or to otherwise exculpate themselves because of a technical flaw in the legal proceedings.
It is annoying, true, and it feels unjust that a guilty person should be defended, but it is important that we defend even the guilty on the odd chance that it turns out that they are actually innocent.
The saying goes, it is better that 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent person be condemned.
Word, brother. This is the way.
Plus there's no such thing as obviously guilty until proven so.
In a world where defense attorneys are a necessity, and they currently are (with no feasible change coming any time soon), then every attorney must provide the best defense they can do their client, period.
It doesn't matter who it is, what they're accused of, or if they're guilty. Everyone is supposed to have access to an attorney that will serve their best interests. You can't have a legal system that involves trials at all and not have all defendants given acces to a full and proper defense.
Any lawyer that can't mount a defense for the most vile human ever to walk the earth would need to be disbarred because everyone has the right to representation, or nobody can trust that their rights matter. And yeah, the system fails a lot, but not because of defense attorneys doing their job.
Literally, if fucking Hitler was to go on trial, his attorneys should be expected to mount the best defense possible. Anything else is bullshit.
Are you not familiar with the defense attorney principle?
Defense attorneys are supposed to fight for their clients rights in an impartial way. They may have access to the evidence, but they did not personally see the crime happen.
A lot of this was built around a world prior to surveillance video being everywhere all the time giving a somewhat clearer picture into events, so for a lot of like public defense attorneys only fight as much as they can. Like if there's clearly video proving it happened (not through video analysis alone but in combination with eyewitness accounts), the defense lawyer can do things like argue for a plea deal but that's about it. With enough evidence, they have to be honest with their client about how realistic their chances are.
Some people who reject reality do things like say their public defense lawyer is shafting them when the lawyer actually can't help them because of the wealth of evidence, and then they follow it up with further stupid shit like trying to represent themselves in court. The reality is the evidence is damning and they're just stupid and irrational to think they can talk their way out of it.
As for people like Johnny Cochran, who represented OJ Simpson. They're the same as anyone else for whom there is no moral and ethical depth they won't plumb just so they can get paid a shitload of money. That's no different than like Trump's pool guy taking a sweetheart contract to do a job incredibly wrong. It's just people who are willing to take the money and fuck the consequences because to them money trumps ethics and morals. So yeah they suck shit, but so does everyone like that, not just defense lawyers.
Also there's the whole two different justice systems thing, which is part of the reason those kind of defense lawyers are so widespread. Hell, one of them is our Attorney General.
A lot of this was built around a world prior to surveillance video being everywhere all the time
Even in a world with surveillance, digital footprints, and advanced forensic evidence techniques, defense attorneys still help keep the system honest: Does the video actually show what the prosecution alleges? Was this digital data obtained with a proper warrant? Is there chain of custody for the forensic evidence, or could it have been tampered?
Demanding integrity is still a key part of the system. The only thing that's changed is what you're demanding it of.
For sure, I didn't mean to imply it isn't! For exactly the situations when cops beat on someone and claim that they were being attacked or fearing for the lives. While bodycams have a host of privacy implications, on the other hand it's a great tool (when not abused) to determine whether police are lying or not.
I don't think whether or not they're "good" people and the clients they end up representing have anything to do with each other.
It's just a part of their job that they end up sometimes representing people who are charged with, and potentially even obviously guilty of, heinous crimes.
And their code of ethics specifically demands that they do their best to represent their client's interests regardless of any and all other considerations.
So even just there, it could be the case that one defense attorney is a vile scumbag who gets off on the idea of freeing obvious criminals and it could just as easily be the case that another defense attorney is a veritable saint who sincerely believes that all people are fundamentally good and that it's their purpose in life to help anyone who needs it, no matter who or what they're deemed to be.
Both of those things undoubtedly exist, and pretty much any position one might imagine between the two, so I don't think there's any way to correlate who they represent and their own qualities.
Now all that said, I certainly couldn't do what they do, and specifically because I couldn't effectively represent someone who was certainly guilty. But that's just me.
They're doing a job that someone has to do.
I think they're just doing the job they get paid to do.
Have you ever been in a criminal court? Even as just a bystander? It's a lot different from tv.
Public defense attorneys don't really get to chose who they represent, if that's specifically what you're talking about.
Well, they're lawyers, so they're automatically scumbags. That being said, I don't think you can judge a generic criminal defense attorney on their choice in clients.
I do think you can judge an attorney on their scope of practice. Copyright trolls are among the worst.
Too hard to determine.
But as long as lawyers decide which cases to take, I'll struggle saying that a lawyer in a situation like that is a good person.
Not because they defend someone that is, in all likelihood, guilty, but because their reasons to do so are generally just money, or a sick enjoyment of "winning" despite their client being obviously guilty.
I had this lawyer present a class, where he made us watch a movie about a guy trapping people in traps that trigger based on the amount of people that watch it on a live stream.
He first started saying that it wasn't the guy's fault, but the viewers' that know that connecting to the stream triggers the trap. I told him that if I put bear traps in front of his door, and he steps on them, he wouldn't say "ah, my bad, I triggered the trap so it's my fault". He couldn't counter that, so he just admitted that he would try to defend him anyway, to see if he could manage to flip things and make him be found innocent, and sort of "win" against the spirit of the law.
This guy was also saying that he likes to only pick the more dramatic cases, because they're more interesting. It was clearly only a game for him.
Just assign cases randomly, no money or picking involved, and things would get better, and we wouldn't have to wonder whether a lawyer is a piece of shit for defending someone or not.
I think most attorneys have no morals, otherwise nobody would defend billionaires who killed people in a DUI, serial killers with irrefutable evidence, pedophiles with their name written millions of times in evidence seized to a pedophile ring leader, and so on.