4.2.12 WC: 191694
Defending a man who admitted his guilt
The myth that guilty clients, even those who have committed murder will confide their guilt to their trusted lawyer, is widespread in literature and reflected in legal rules that encourage a relationship of trust between lawyer and client. The reality is that guilty (as well as some innocent clients) don’t trust their lawyers with their deep, dark secrets. Most believe that their lawyer will work harder for innocent defendants than for guilty ones, so they lie through their teeth.
They claim, especially at the beginning of their relationship with their lawyer, that they are the totally innocent victims of a horrible injustice. They admit nothing. In order to get some sense of what actually happened, I ask them the following question:
“If your worst enemy, the person behind this horrible injustice, were to testify against you, what lies would he testify to? What would he say you did?”
The answer they give often comes close to what really happened. In this way, I obtain a working knowledge—always subject to reevaluation based on new evidence—of what may have occurred, without directly accusing my new client of being a liar.
Only one client who was accused of a killing has admitted to me that he was guilty. He really had no choice, since the very fact of his guilt was an essential element of his defense. The case was a strange one from beginning to end. Not only was my client guilty of having participated in a crime that resulted in the death of a young woman, he also—it turned out—was a government informant who was providing information to the police as to what he and his group were doing.
I have related this story in detail in Zhe Best Defense and will not repeat it here, except to describe how it feels to win a case on behalf of an admittedly guilty defendant. Not only did he go free as the result of our legal arguments, but all of his co-conspirators—the ones who actually planted the smoke bomb that suffocated the woman—went free as well. (My client, who was an engineer, had constructed the smoke bomb, knowing that it was going to be placed in a crowded area.)
When I first undertook the pro bono representation of Sheldon Siegel, he faced a possible death sentence. I had no idea that he was informing against his colleagues in the Jewish Defense League at the same time that he was making bombs for them. Informers are a peculiar lot, often undecided about which side they are on—other than their own side. Siegel was committed to the ideology of the JDL, including their sometime use of violence to make their point. But he was also desirous of protecting his own head and he knew he was vulnerable to prosecution for the bombs he had constructed that had been used against Soviet targets in the United States. He hoped to avoid prosecution by providing the government with selective information about his JDL colleagues and their plans. He also hoped the JDL would never find out that he was playing both sides against the middle.
One of their plans—to plant a smoke bomb in the office of Sol Hurok, a Jewish impresario who
brought musicians to the United States from the Soviet Union—went awry and a young Jewish woman named Iris Kones died from inhaling smoke from a bomb that was intended to disrupt but
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