Maybe we need to create some “super-Don’t” label for when a story like this comes along: “A defense attorney and former federal prosecutor whose clients have included rap stars and a soldier at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was charged Wednesday with arranging the killing of one witness and trying to hire a hit man to kill another.” [AP/1010WINS]
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Saw it yesterday. Amazing, just damned amazing.
What about prosecutors who do not have their law licenses?
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:http://www.salisburypost.com/Area/051409-wagoner-us-attorney-had-suspended-license
Wondering if the case against him runs into attorney-client privilege. How come the news item already refers to the content of a taped phone call between him and a client?
Would that be considered excessive or merely a good old fashioned zealous defense. If they can successfully mount such a defense for themselves, they just might get off.
I’m not a lawyer, but the attorney-client privilege generally has a number of exceptions. And one of those exceptions covers this situation. If you’re talking to an attorney about how best to handle a crime you’ve already committed, that’s privileged; but if you’re talking to an attorney about how to commit a future crime, that’s not. When last I checked, murder was a crime. So any discussions about how to murder witnesses (or anybody else) would not be privileged.
And at the risk of stating the obvious, no, this is not “merely a good old-fashioned zealous defense”. A lawyer is neither legally nor ethically allowed to commit crimes in order to represent a client.
Of course, the real fun here will be trying to empanel a jury (assuming there’s no guilty plea). I would imagine that many potential jurors would react rather negatively to being told that they were assigned to the trial of someone accused of murdering a participant of a previous trial.