[PEN-L:27382] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: most experts agree

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2002 10:10 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:27380] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: most experts agree


> >
> >>Do not all lawyers agree that it's their job to make sure the
guilty get
> >>punished and the innocent go free?
> >
> >No. The job of criminal defense lawyers is to make sure the
guilty go free.
> >The job of a civil defense lawyer is to make sure the liable do
not pay for
> >their violations. It's an lawyer's ethical duty of zealous
representation.
> >

================

I wonder how many in the legal profession would clig to those
assertion after reading Arthur Ripstein's latest?

>
> It's also the job of plaintiff's lawyers to make sure that the
defendant
> pays were or not he's liable. And in my experience many
prosecutors think
> that it's their job to send the defendant top jail for as long
as possible
> whether or not he's guilty or deserves a long sentence. Not all
prosectors
> thus misbehave.
>
> jks

===================

Says who? These sound like self-fulfilling injunctions of a
self-constituted professional class  in order to secure economic
advantage by externalizing the possibility and costs of
inajudicability to me. Where did the legal community get the
authority to engage in such activity?  Did the electorates of the
past 225+ years really delegate such issues to the legal
profession or is there some kind of Platonism that has yet to be
vanquished? Or is there going to be a disagreement cascade on
these issues?

Ian