For nearly 26 years, the affidavit was sealed in an envelope and stored in a locked box, tucked away with the lawyer’s passport and will. Sometimes he stashed the box in his bedroom closet, other times under his bed.
It stayed there — year after year, decade after decade…
It said…an innocent man was behind bars. His name was Alton Logan. He did not kill a security guard in a McDonald’s restaurant in January 1982.
“In fact,” the document said, “another person was responsible…”
But, the ethics of lawyer-client privilege – as defined by the great state of Illinois in the Land of Justice for All – allowed two public defenders to keep hidden the evidence that could free an innocent man.
I’m not going to read the referenced article, because this is all so common and all so unnecessary showing one of the real foibles of our legal system.
Rather than keep an innocent man in jail, on affidavit from the attorney, the local DA should provide immunity to the actually guilty person so that he can come forward and give his evidence.
Justice is not justice when its one sided.
The foible==the systems over reliance on “rules” which turns the system into a game, a game that too often is unfair, misguided, and not just. It is final though, which it champions, wrongly, as the justification for so much stupidity.
A couple of lawyers are gonna burn in hell. What else is new.
There are always costs to be paid in any compromise. Unfortunately, not every situation is a win-win situation.
#2–Pirate==NO, you have it exactly wrong. Lawyers in these cases can be punished by their Bar Associations if they reveal their cleints involvement in crimes. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT.
#3–Sam==quite right but the “worse” compromise doesn’t need to be enshrined. Please think past the status quo.
#4 Drink some coffee you old grouch.
#5–Pirate==No thanks. I’m having a double cappacino. I don’t know which is more stimulating, the caffeine or your lack of insight. Both make me feel great.
Lawyer-client confidentially is integral to the entire legal system. Your lawyer is supposed to be working for you, representing you, if you can’t expect that person to do that and not work with the authorities to incriminate you then the relationship is untenable. Of course some people would cynically like a world without lawyers, but the truth is that they are a necessity in any modern legal system. There is no way to make the laws that govern a modern society simple enough to be thoroughly understood by the layman so that he can defend himself properly in court.
As I read this story the other day I kept thinking, “Fuck Ethics”, and there should be a law that prevents this sort of ethical dilemma.
There can’t be a law that prevents this sort of ethical dilemma – it’s either going to not cover the problem (which is what happened here), or it’s going to go overbroad to the point where a lawyer won’t be able to work with his client because the client will never be able to trust his lawyer.
This is an unfortunate case where two ethical lawyers did what they could do. Could they have (morally) gone a step further, turned the information over to the court, and risked repercussion? Sure. But that’s a decision for the individual lawyer – it has nothing to do with the laws themselves.
(It’s the same for any profession. If you know your boss is doing something fishy, you can rat out your boss and risk being fired, or you can keep your trap shut and keep your job. The situation is no different, but for the stakes being unfortunately higher.)
Well, gee whiz. Too many posters here have the issue a bit fuzzy.
There is NO ETHICAL DILEMMA presented.
The lawyer is ethically and legally bound to keep the information secret. He has taken an oath to do so. If he violates this oath, he can be prosecuted for it. WHERE IS THE DILEMMA?
I’m sure you would all agree its better for 10 guilty men to go free than to convict one innocent man—right? DILEMMAS?
In this case, it is better that 10 innocent men rot away in jail than one guilty man lose his right to counsel.
Now, just for those of you who are sputtering, JUST BECAUSE you don’t like a moral, ethical, legal requirement enforced by law and by 100’s of years of precedent and good social engineering values, does not mean there is a dilemma. It just means YOU AREN’T ETHICAL.
Deal with it.
#6
Hi again bobbo-the-troll(in training),
Go sit in the corner, its time-out for you junior. Tell you what, you can win this one, I don’t spank children on Sundays. Babble on all you like, Happy holidays 🙂
#10
What he said, jeesh you need to chill out on that fancy-man coffee.
@#10: You don’t think officers of the court have an ethical obligation to make sure someone they know for a fact is innocent, isn’t punished? They don’t have to implicate their client — just convince the DA that the defendant is innocent.
This sort of thing is why I have an undying hatred for cops, prosecutors and lawyers in general. A pox on them all.
#13–Sean==of course I do. See my post #1.
Words have meaning though. This example of “legal ethics” is really one of the best.
Do words and ideas mean what I think they do (My post #1) or do they mean what society has decided (My post #10).
One interesting thing about the law, anyone can have their own opinion, but when there is a contest/disagreement, it is the law that decides.
Some people can’t handle it, in fact, maybe most.
>>This sort of thing is why I have an
>>undying hatred for cops, prosecutors
>>and lawyers in general. A pox on them all.
I’m with you there, Probe-meister.
#16–Mustard==and your alternative dispute resolution system is what?
>>and your alternative dispute resolution
>>system is what?
Don’t have one yet, Mister Bobbolina. That’s why I’m not running for POTUS or District Attorney.
What I DO have, though, is an undying hatred for most cops, prosecutors, and lawyers.
There’s a certain type of person that’s drawn towards those “professions”, and it’s the last kind of person in the world who should be trusted with promoting Truth, Justice, and The American Way. Most of those dickwads shouldn’t be trusted with monitoring Dumpster(R) usage, much less have people’s lives in their hands.
Maybe closer oversight/ regulation, and immediate tasering of anyone caught violating the trust? That would be an easy one to get past a Dumbyan signature, if it weren’t for the fact that most of the people who work for him are carrying out his dirty work.
#18–Mustard==totally pointless to criticize without offering an alternative. Childlike and silly.
So you want “someone” to immediately taser anyone caught violating the trust? And there you have the difficulty of the issue you won’t even begin to rationally address.
Not good.
Bobbo,
Once again you have carried the torch. Quite well too.
The police, judges, and prosecutors are charged with putting the right person in jail. The defense lawyer is charged with giving his client his best effort and trust. So before you blame the lawyers who protected their client, maybe you could look at those who actually convicted an innocent man.
Oh yeah, sure! It’s all about legal ethics. You can bet that if some dude, this lawyer was appointed to represent, had admitted to kill that lawyers wife, said lawyer would be singing his ass off to the cops. This isn’t about Justice, or defending some privilege between lawyer and client. It’s about propping up a system of shakey ethics and rules. Rules that often get tossed aside when its some lawyer or judge’s ass that compromised. Then, like with doctors, records get lost, or changed. Rules bend, jurisdictions crossed. Just rent Al Pacino’s “And Justice for All”, and you’ll understand.
bobbo,
I have a very hard time believing there wasn’t a way for those lawyer to do the right thing an still remain faithful to their oath.
Aren’t side deals and practical compromises done ALL THE TIME? Surely something could have been worked out in this case.
As a person working with the (Boston) public defender’s office, I can tell you – side deals are not made “all the time” at all.
To respond to a few legal idiocies that have been pointed out:
#13 – “You don’t think officers of the court have an ethical obligation to make sure someone they know for a fact is innocent, isn’t punished? They don’t have to implicate their client — just convince the DA that the defendant is innocent.”
The problem here is one of slippery slope. You can make a rule that says “It’s ok for a lawyer to tell on his client if it’ll save some third party from facing legal repercussions”, but then you have a situation where the client has no reason to trust his lawyer with any information. (Believe me, these communities tend to be small, even in the big cities. Courts operate in a very district level way, with the same people cycling in and out. So it’s a big chance that a client telling you a minor note on a crime here or there would have a big impact on someone else’s case. Most of the time, you try to do what you can to help a brother defense attorney out. But it’s our job to do what’s best for our client and trust that the other defense attorney is good enough to keep an innocent man out of jail.)
So you can either have a system where we don’t trust people charged with crimes – at which point we might as well do away with due process altogether – or we accept that sometimes, bad situations will happen, and it’ll be the lawyer’s moral choice whether to risk his job or to accept his ethical duty.
#21) “It’s all about legal ethics. You can bet that if some dude, this lawyer was appointed to represent, had admitted to kill that lawyers wife, said lawyer would be singing his ass off to the cops.”
This could, theoretically happen, but at this point the lawyer is no longer bound by his ethical responsibility to his client, because by default he can no longer represent him to the best of his ability. Ergo, if you ever kill a lawyer’s wife, never tell him about it, because the proper human response to a loved one being killed is to seek vengeance.
See, the lawyer and the courts and all that are meant to be impartial – IE, to be beyond seeking simple vengeance. That’s why the ethical rules exist – to ensure that even if you don’t like your client, you are able to represent him to the best of your ability. It’s when there’s a personal stake involved where the lawyer is no longer bound by the rules of the lawyer/client relationship, because you violate that impartial/impersonal barrier.
#22: “I have a very hard time believing there wasn’t a way for those lawyer to do the right thing an still remain faithful to their oath.”
There wasn’t – and if you read the article it’s not like they didn’t try.
However, what I disagree with then is that you’re faced with a moral dilemma beyond the ethical one. If they revealed what their client told them, they can save an innocent man – more than likely at the expense of their job and future legal career. (And, believe me, if you’re working for the public defender you’re living paycheck to paycheck.) They could have done it, and I’m honestly not sure what I would have done, but there would have been a lot of fallout.
#22 again) “Aren’t side deals and practical compromises done ALL THE TIME?”
Dear God, no. Stop thinking like every lawyer is Michael Clayton. Especially with a public defender’s office. A criminal defense attorney is in the worst possible negotiating position that a person can be – he’s likely got a hostile client (since the client didn’t get to pick his lawyer, he was just saddled with the lawyer in court), bad evidence, and a DA can honestly give two shits. This isn’t a friendly community where DAs and PDs get along famously and play golf on Sundays. It’s an adversarial system, and as much as we smile across tables at each other, shake hands, and play nice, there’s a lot of resentment from one side to the other.
I mean – think about it a second. It’s your job as a DA to make sure the people prosecuted (guilty or not) go to jail. That’s how you get good job reviews – by the number of convictions you get, compared to the number of trials you go into. It’s my job as a defense attorney to make sure my client either doesn’t even go near a trial or, if he does, doesn’t get convicted. In other words, in a very real sense, it’s my job to make sure you can’t get a good review in yours. How do you humanly maintain friendliness after that?
But the more important question is why would you even listen when a defense attorney comes up to you and, absent hard evidence, tells you he thinks the man you’re prosecuting is innocent. Here’s a news flash: All of us defense attorneys think our clients are actually innocent of the crimes they’re charged with! Sure, they’re certainly not upstanding citizens, but we constantly face a barrage of trumped up charges, police adding details after-the-fact, racism, sexism, class segregation, and every possible civil liberty violation you can think of. It’s our job to deal with it.
#18, Mister Mustard – you clearly have no idea how your legal system works. Just… don’t.
The people involved here were defense attorneys. Had they been DAs they would have been required to turn over the evidence as exculpatory – otherwise it’d be what we call a Brady violation, which is grounds for an immediate remand, if not outright dismissal of charges. They were trying to do their best for their client and avoid him getting the death penalty – and if you think that a person who doesn’t want another person to die “shouldn’t be trusted with monitoring Dumpster(R) usage, much less have people’s lives in their hands” I would hate to live in a world with a fascist like you as dictator.
let’s see
ruin my career or let a man rot for almost thirty years?
personally, if you believe in a god, you have to say that it would be time to start a new career.
or you be like one of the a-holes on this list who think it’s okay to let a man rot in jail.
whatever.
#22–GregA==you are just starting to wrestle with the real issue.
Do you think the top article was made up? Some lawyer sat on the evidence for years because he couldn’t think of a way to reveal the information??
That’s why at post #1 I suggest a rule change to provide for situations like this.
BTW–no change in any issue if the client is your wife’s murderer. Maybe more motivation to violate the ethics, but no change to any of the underlying issues.
No change if you refuse to represent the client or stop representing him. The duty ((anyone understand what a “duty” is???)) continues.
In other words, with full knowledge that the rationale for this ethical rule has some logic to it, some rational ends, and has been followed for centuries–I still think it is wrong and there are ways to modify it. Its only one such rule among dozens. It forms the foundation for the old saying “The law is an ass.”
#24, That’s easy to say from a web browser.
I think the bigger question is how did the innocent man get prosecuted in the first place?
We can’t build a legal system based on confessions made to one’s own lawyer.
#27–Ron==well, I’ll bet there was “evidence” against him and his alibi wasn’t believed.
Now, how is having a very rarely used exception for attorney initiated information and request for immunity become a basis for a legal system?
You sound like the type of status quo advocate that allows travesties like this to continue.
#27, Ron,
Good comment.
Can anyone point to a prosecutor other than Nifong, cop, or Judge who knowingly sent an innocent man to jail or even continued the prosecution?
#29–Catshit==the hole in your argument is “Knows.” Very hard to know.
What does happen “all the time” is prosecutions proceed when everyone knows the evidence is not very good. “Let the jury decide.”
After the trial, appeals based on actual innocense are extremely difficult. “Can’t give you two bites at the apple, shoulda had a better lawyer, got to be an end sometime, an appeal assumes the finder of fact is correct and only reviews procedures.” etc.
In fact, even what I propose is frought with difficulties. I can see an underground business spring up with people giving false confessions under seal of immunity.
Life can be quite unfair and its hard to imagine anything otherwise? Maybe brain scans is the answer?