[m21sniper]

Originally Posted by MRM

I haven't been following the case too closely, but my understanding is that the situation was that the two lawyers were public defenders many years ago. In the course of defending a client on one charge, he confessed to them that he was the one who had committed the murder the other guy was then on trial for, and ended up being convicted for. It is against the law for a lawyer to disclose what is said in client confidence. If the lawyers had broken their silence then they would have lost their jobs. licenses, and gone to jail. And not a single lawyer would have defended them because the attorney-client priviledge is so important that it is bigger than any one injustice. Just think of the distruct the cynics on this board would have for lawyers if, in addition to their other complaints, they knew that lawyers could blab private information confessed to them in confidence - private information that was necessary to defend the criminal, I mean client.

The best they could get their client to do was promise to release the lawyers from client confidentiality after the client died. Since he was in the process of being sentenced to death row, everyone thought that would be soon. But the death sentence got commuted to life, and the real bad guy didn't die until recently.

So what the lawyers did was moral, ethical, and legal. Was it right? I'd like to think that in the same situation I would have broken my vow of confidentiality and sacrificed myself to keep an innocent guy out of jail, but I can't say that was the right thing to do. Remember the Navy lawyer who passed on the names of all the Gitmo detainees to a civil rights organization? He went to jail as he should have. Where do you draw the line? He thought he was preventing an injustice too. The lawyer really can't make those value judgments. He has to be an instrument of the law and follow the law.

I piss on this entire mentality. May all the attorneys and the DA involved all rot in hell for an eternity.

It's a real shame there probably isn't one.