I don’t know how many of y’all remember the King murder trials from last summer. Prosecutor David Rimmer was pursuing cases against both Mr. King’s two sons and an outsider named Mr. Chavis, and created a huge stir because the theory he was pursuing in one case was inconsistent with the theory he was pursuing in the other. Given that prosecutors are supposed to prove their cases beyond reasonable doubt, a lot of people were skeptical– if one tries to prove two contradictory things, surely it’s reasonable to doubt either or both?
Well, the man who “even lawyers sa(y) ha(s) given lawyers a bad name” is now in the clear, so far as the Florida Bar is concerned.
I remember being a little upset at Mr. Rimmer when I first heard about this last year, but I think there’s an important consideration here. There’s a tendency to treat a lawyer’s argument in one case as completely separate from his arguments in other cases, not to be prejudicecd against an advocate merely because of the positions he’s advocated in the past. I think that’s probably a good thing.
Thus, when Solicitor General Ted Olson makes an argument in front of the Supreme Court, the court shouldn’t hold it against him that he argued in Bush v. Gore, and when Johnnie Cochran defends an accused murderer, we shouldn’t say, “well, he got O.J. acquitted, so this guy’s probably guilty too.”
Obviously these things don’t form a perfect analogy here, but I think they’re a reminder of a rule we might otherwise ignore– that a lawyer’s job in the courtroom is to make the best case on the evidence that he can, and that our job is to pretend that he’s a dispassionate advocate, and ignore the question of what he does with the rest of his time.
Maybe being a prosecutor is different, because of the discretion involved, but then again, maybe that discretion doesn’t detract from the lawyer’s right to have each case considered in balkanized isolation.
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