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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

I once asked a high-school acquaintance of mine who had just graduated with a law degree, if she knew someone committed a violent crime, if she would still represent that person in court. Her answer was that even a violent criminal has a right for a fair trial. That sounded to me as evasive as it was rehearsed. I reckoned that this is something they have been taught/justified in law school.

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The ethics behind this is has been deeply studied and debated, and the "right to representation" is an important right. The system is based on checks and balances, and there's no certainty the violent criminal is guilty for the specific crime they're being charged with.

This is likely related to the adversarial nature of the courts, prosecutors vs defenders. Defenders ethically need to defend equally, basic game theory, aka Prisoner's Dilemma.

Have a read of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cab-rank_rule

In a nutshell, English barristers must accept cases from anyone regardless of their circumstances or character otherwise “an unpopular person might not get legal representation; barristers who acted for them might be criticised for doing so”.

“Justice” is the result of the process by which trials are fair - is one way of looking at it. Contrasted with the view that once we know who the bad people are (how?) guilt is presumed and summary punishment is all they’re entitled to.

Isn't that the right answer though?

Yeah it is. But what I was more interested in is what an individual lawyer might be thinking in that scenario. What I asked was a more specific question. Place where I live in, first degree murder carries death penalty. So, I was wondering what a lawyer would do/think if she knew for certain that her client committed an act that qualifies as first degree murder (e.g. He confessed to her). Because then as far as the justice system concerned, the outcome of a fair trial would be death penalty and she as the defendant would be trying to circumvent that. Not sure why I'm down voted, I genuinely asked her out of curiosity.

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