tinyrick wrote:Trump tweeting crap Alan Dershowitz says on Fox & Friends. Didn't Dershowitz get famous by defending an obviously guilty client, who was also a beloved public figure, and getting him off by swaying public opinion?
The complaint, essentially, is that Dershowitz did his job as a defense attorney. I see this a lot in media depictions of defense attorneys: the view that their job is getting guilty people off. In fact their job is to do the best that they can for their client: regardless of whether their client is innocent or guilty everyone deserves a fair trial.
However I used to be an admirer of Alan Dershowitz, until he did something else that defense attorneys often do: he defended child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein by smearing his victims. If you're bringing charges of sexual assault against someone, you can almost guarantee that you will be cross-examined about your drug use, your sexual history, and all sorts of sundry other sordid details, and you will likely face witnesses lying about those things as well. This is a major reason why sex crimes are rarely prosecuted: few victims are willing to go through with the ordeal our justice system has decided they must endure.
Now, I don't understand why evidence about the victim's past sexual behavior or drug or alcohol use is considered relevant in the first place (I think I may have sent up the avi signal here), but our courts have deemed it relevant. Thus, what Dershowitz did is not only legal, but under the premise defense attorneys are obligated to do everything they can to help their clients he was arguably obligated to do what he did. You can argue he didn't have to take the case, but if defense attorneys only took cases they morally supported we'd have a serious problem.
As a rule, I don't judge defense attorneys for using any means in their power to get their clients off, but I make an exception for the tactics typically used in defending against sex crimes. I believe that it is morally wrong to smear victims of sexual assault in order to get your client off, that this is qualitatively different from putting your client in a position where they're free to commit more crimes.
I can make two arguments for why this is. The first is that sex crimes are the only example I know of where this pattern of behavior is routine, and I would likely be just as appalled if it happened in other cases. However I don't think that "the burglary victims were bringing it on by posting on Facebook that they were out to dinner," would appeal to juries in the same way that victim-blaming for sex crimes does, and therefore it's not something I see enough to object to. The second difference is that you're forcing victims not merely to relive their ordeals but to undergo a new ordeal as you drag their name through the mud. As I see it, there's a difference between helping your client remain free to commit new crimes and committing an injury against your client's victim yourself.
However I suspect that some people will disagree with me both that it's acceptable for defense attorneys to work to get people they know are guilty off, and that some people will insist that I'm wrong and there's no principled way to distinguish smearing the victims of a child rapist and getting a celebrity murderer off the hook (some of them may even be the same people). So I feel like this is a question worth discussing.