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In My Line of Work . . .

May 5, 2008 10:45 PM

fter we sold that house, we got a bunch of congratulations. One of the people that congratulated us mentioned that we should be happy about the victories we get because those of us in our line of work don't get to win very much. I knew what she meant, but I think I didn't really understand it until today.

See, I never expected to end up doing criminal-defense work. In fact, I usually gave this kind of work as a specific example of things I didn't want to do. The whole thing seemed unsavory, you know? I mean, intellectually, I know that every single accused criminal deserves to have every single one of their rights, as trivial as they seem, protected vigorously and zealously. But it's another thing entirely when the person is accused of something truly heinous and you're the person who has to protect their rights. The whole thing boiled down to the fact that I wasn't sure that I could--or that I would enjoy--helping bad people get away with doing bad things.

But that's not what I do. I protect my clients' interests and I make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they get justice. Getting justice and avoiding consequences are not the same thing. And I've been surprised how many of my clients are less interested in avoiding any sort of consequence than making sure that the sentence they get is fair for what they did. At the end of the day, very few of my clients are unsavory, and the ones that are unmitigated bad people are in the extreme minority.

For the most part, my clients are surprisingly normal people that have made astoundingly bad decisions. They are culpable, certainly, but they're still human. And that's what makes this thing hard sometimes.

There are times when, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you prepare, no matter how articulately you argue, no matter how unjust some result might seem, you cannot avoid it. And then you have to look your client in the eye and apologize to them because you both know that the result is unjust.

So after today, I think I have some vague understanding about why that fellow attorney made such a big deal out of our relatively small victory. And, sadly, I know what the vast majority of this career is going to be like.


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