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4.2.12
WC: 191694

Murder Cases I Didn’t Take

For every client whose case I agree to take, I must, regretfully, turn down many. Every week, I receive dozens, sometimes hundreds, of calls, emails and letters asking me to review cases. Many of them involve homicides, because some of my most highly publicized cases have involved clients accused of murder. Because I am a full time professor, my time for litigation is limited. So I must choose only a handful each year among the many worthy cases. I have several criteria for choosing which cases I will accept. I rarely turn down cases in which defendants face the prospect of the death penalty by an American court, and when I do, I try to get another lawyer, often a former student, to take the case. (The same is true for cases involving freedom of speech or other First Amendment protections.)

I never turn down a homicide case because it is too hard or because I am too unlikely to win. When I took the Von Bulow case, nearly everyone thought we had no chance of winning. New York Magazine, in an article about my involvement in the case, quoted “one of the country’s leading criminal lawyers” predicting that I would lose the appeal: “He’ll add something useful and do a brilliant analysis of the record. He isn’t going to make it. Of some guys you can say “That’s a patient he isn’t going to save. He can only make him more comfortable.”

Esquire magazine had commented that the Von Bulow appeal “looked like another ritualistic exercise in civil libertarian dogma” that “would churn through the courts simply because there was money available and a set of arguments that could be made, rather than because [I] had any real sense that justice in some way had gone astray.”

And one commentator snidely observed that Von Bulow’s “recruitment of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz shortly after his conviction would tend to reinforce” the view that Claus Von Bulow “was no longer protecting his innocence, merely the methods used to catch him…Dershowitz enjoys a wide reputation as a last resort for convicted criminals, being especially keep at finding legal loopholes that render his clients’ convictions unconstitutional.”

Similar predictions were made about the O.J. Simpson case and others that I subsequently won. I actually prefer difficult and challenging cases which the pundits claim are unwinnable. I also never decline clients because they are too unpopular, too controversial or too guilty.

Why do I defend people who I know are guilty? Because that’s the job of a criminal defense lawyer and I have chosen that noble profession. But why did I choose a profession in which my job would be to defend guilty, as well as innocent, defendants? Because unless the guilty are vigorously defended, the innocent will be at greater risk of being prosecuted, convicted and executed. The reality is that the vast majority of people who are charged with serious crimes are factually guilty—that is, they did it! Thank goodness for that. Would anyone want to live in a country where the majority of people charged with crime were innocent? That may be true in Iran, China and Belarus, but it is not true of the United States, England, Israel and other countries with a zealous defense bar. And in order to keep it that way, everyone accused of crime, whether innocent or guilty, must be vigorously defended within the rules of law and ethics. I’m proud to

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