4.2.12 WC: 191694
be a leader of the criminal defense bar and to have successfully defended many accused criminals, some innocent, some guilty.
There are, however, certain categories of clients I will almost never accept. These include professional criminals who are in the business of doing illegal things and will almost certainly go back to that business if I get them off: drug dealers, Mafioso, terrorists, gang leaders. These professional criminals are entitled to counsel, but I do not want to become a “consiglieri” to a crime family (remember Tom Hagen in the Godfather) or an advisor to those who are in the business of committing crimes.
I also do not generally represent fugitives from justice while they are still “on the lam.” A lawyer’s job does not include helping a client illegally evade or escape from justice.
I try to take interesting cases that will have an impact on law, cases in which an injustice has been done or seems likely to be done, and cases involving my personal areas of expertise (science, constitutional law, psychology). I take about half of my cases on a pro bono basis and the other half on a fee basis. I use the fees to support the expenses of my pro bono cases.
Among the most interesting cases I declined have been accusations of murder committed outside the United States and involving foreign leaders. As an American lawyer, I have less of an obligation to take foreign cases than I do to take American ones.
Perhaps the most difficult case for me to have turned down involved the Israeli student, Igal Amir, who was accused of assassinating the late Yitchaz Rabin, the then Prime Minister of Israel. Several days after the crime that rocked the world, the family of the man accused of committing it asked me to become his lawyer. I met with them and they told me that he had in fact pulled the trigger, but that he was legally innocent, because the killing was justified under the Jewish law of “rodef’—a concept akin to preventive or anticipatory self-defense, or defense of others. This concept, which derives from a Biblical passage, as interpreted by Jewish sages including Maimondes, authorizes the killing of a person who is about to do great harm to an individual or to the community as a whole. The man who killed Rabin apparently believed that Rabin was about to make a peace with the Palestinians that involved giving back “sacred” land that had been captured by Israel during the Six Day War. He also believed that such a peace would endanger the lives of Israelis, and so he set out to stop it by killing the “rodef’ who had endangered it.”
The trial of Rabin’s killer promised to be among the most interesting of my career and among the most important in the history of the Jewish state. Although the crime did not carry the death penalty (Israel has abolished the death penalty except for the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people, under which Adolph Eichman was hanged), the case fit many of the criteria I generally consider in taking a case. But I decided not to take it.
The reason was that it involved the kind of political defense that I abhorred. If every citizen had the right to decide who was a “rodef” deserving of death, there would be anarchy. The “rule of personal politics” would replace the rule of law. The defense of “rodef” was not, in my view, a legitimate legal defense, and I, as a lawyer, was not obligated to present it.
3 T am comfortable describing this “defense,” since it was made public by him and his family.
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