Law Life: Protecting the most despised protects us

By Craig Napier The Daily Record Newswire "Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts." H.L. Mencken penned this little gem and I live it. The other week was a hard week, losing an hour Sunday, court for days and plenty of yelling with prosecutors in the interim. Sex crimes make life difficult; the stakes are so high and the accusations so disgusting that it seems like everyone is on edge. Mix a child into the nastiness and the witnesses, the victims, the jailers, the law enforcement officers, the accused and even the lawyers are motivated to do the right thing by using profoundly different slants on the facts. "I have a fundamental problem with your job." I heard that this week and it wasn't even from a civilian. At least it wasn't a fundamental problem with the way I was doing my job. It was just that my job exists. These are situations that challenge even the most intelligent among us and their notions of justice. "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice." Though this quote has been attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., it is impossible to really verify without a trip to the library. The problem inherent in defending folks charged with the most heinous of crimes in this country is that our laws don't always comport with our notions of justice. I am duty bound to do my job in as zealous and competent a manner as is humanly possible. I am not going to cut corners because my client is accused of something creepy, heinous, or otherwise unpopular. The feeling from many parts of the legal community and the public seems to be that if someone is charged with something particularly heinous then his defense lawyer -- not to mention his appointed defense lawyer -- should put him on the fast track to prisonville. In my reading of the job description, however, this is essentially at odds with the mandate given to the defense lawyer. I have to remind myself in minor cases to be more vigilant in holding the state to its burden of proof. That seems more acceptable to the community at large than holding prosecutors to their burden when the government is trying to put someone on probation for the rest of his life for a crime. In reality, the obligation is equal for the lawyer in any case where the government is trying to take someone's freedom. "You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can be free only if I am free." Clarence Darrow gave us many a cleverly turned phrase in his storied career, but this one sums up what I've been working through this week. To me it's clear that when we offer the full protections of our laws to the people we despise the most, we succeed in observing our laws and constitutional mandates. Justice is a nebulous concept, but observance of the law and striving for fairness is not abstract. To me that means I challenge "the man" at every turn, work with the people who are enforcing the law in a professional and courteous manner, and completely ignore the emotional mob-rules mentality of a majority of our citizens. It is not necessarily democratic, but it is as close to a just goal as I can think of at this time. My job is the same in every case and in a large part that includes ensuring that my clients know and understand their rights, and that those rights don't get over-looked or overcome by the zeal of law enforcement. Either way I guess I'll just catch up on some sleep, steel myself for the uncomfortable fights ahead, and bask in the self-anointed task of working for the definition of justice that I believe lives up to the uneasy balance between what I am obliged to do ethically and what the community would like me to do. ---------- Craig Napier is an attorney in the Kirksville office of the Missouri State Public Defender System. He can be reached at ncnapier@gmail.com. Published: Wed, Mar 23, 2011