Who We Are and What We Do - Once More into the Breach, Dear Friends

A young criminal defense lawyer gets hammered day after day.  A court issues a particularly egregiously offensive ruling, ignoring the facts, misrepresenting the law, all to ensure that the young lawyer's client is convicted.  He writes half a dozen criminal defense lawyers he knows, respects, has worked with, who've been doing this far longer than he.

I have noticed that several of my brethren in the defense community seem to take the ubiquitous hypocrisy and duplicitousness in the practice of criminal defense with a block of salt.  Others laugh it off.  Still others are so incompetent, they never realize just how bad it is.  While still others feel that no matter how bad the decisions of the executive and judicial branches of our state and federal government, the criminals probably deserve it.

Stuck as I am with my libertarian slant on everything and a sort of passion, and perhaps infatuation, with the Constitution and its ideals, I am angered, frustrated, and exasperated by the intellectual dishonesty and incompetency of judges, prosecutors, and lest I be accused of some bias, other criminal defense attorneys.

How is it that each of you has confronted these concerns throughout your careers?  (Other than the occasional libation).

Here's part of what I wrote back, revised and expanded (a bit) for the blawgosphere.

Look, criminal defense lawyers, at least the ones who are serious about it, mostly cynics.  If we didn't start out at least a little that way (and I suspect most of us did), we learned and earned our cynicism in the trenches as we watched the facts distorted and the law mangled by prosecutors and judges so that out clients could get screwed.
And yet cynicism is only half the equation.  It's flip side is romanticism.  As we are cynics, so we are romantics.  Our role model is, ultimately, a cross between Sam Spade, who won't take the fall for Brigid O'Shaughnessy because every fiber of his being wants him to, and Don Quixote, tilting at windmills and getting battered but by god he gets up again to go after the evil he sees - and to preserve the beauty. 
I knew a guy in college, intellectual, smart as a whip, did way too much heroin.  He's now a professor of classical literature.  He said one day that he wouldn't have minded being a slave in the middle ages just to know that something as beautiful as the cathedral at Chartres was being built.  I think he was wrong, but that's the attitude.
A couple of months ago I wrote a post in response response to John Kindley who was beating himself up and thinking about quitting law because he could no longer believe that the judges would do the right thing, no longer believe that they were even interested in justice.  A regular reader, a guy who calls himself "Mad Jack," wrote a comment but really it was his advice to Kindley.

Get back in there and start hitting the ball, because every once in a while you'll get one over the fence and some poor schmuck will not get railroaded into taking a plea bargain for 20 to life for a crime he did not commit.

Because, see, we actually win sometimes.  And we do make a difference for people.
On the one side is all that power: police, prosecutors, judges, the newspaper, Nancy Grace, public opinion - even the law.  On the other side is our client.  And we intercede. 

You want to get to him?  You have to go through me.

And of course mostly they do.  Go through us, that is.  

The lone citizen can't withstand a tank.  Remember Tienanmen Square.

And yet Thoreau was right.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.

Battered but never beaten because it's the fight that gives us strength and because dammit, we're right.
And so we pick ourselves up and do it again the next day.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

Shakespeare, Henry V, Act III, Scene 1