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Full-Text Articles in Law
Defending The Innocent, Abbe Smith
Defending The Innocent, Abbe Smith
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Of the legal scholarship examining the representation of the innocent accused, most has to do with guilty pleas, not trial or post-trial advocacy. Most of this literature is concerned with the pressure put on innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to receive a more lenient sentence than what they would get if found guilty at trial. This problem is compounded by the inability of poor defendants to make bail. Unfortunately, there are other, equally insidious ways to pressure innocent defendants to plead guilty. When addressing the question of defending the innocent at trial or in a post-conviction challenge, most …
Litigators’ Ethics, Michael E. Tigar
Defending Defending: The Case For Unmitigated Zeal On Behalf Of People Who Do Terrible Things, Abbe Smith
Defending Defending: The Case For Unmitigated Zeal On Behalf Of People Who Do Terrible Things, Abbe Smith
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Although defending defending may be an endless pursuit, I cannot help taking it on. I am, after all, a defender myself, and defending fellow defenders seems to go with the territory. Of course, attacks on criminal defenders do not come out of nowhere - difficult and complex questions often arise in criminal defense work. Unfortunately, the questions that are raised in the aftermath of a high profile case such as the Abner Louima case are usually the easy ones - questions that have more to do with the nature of the adversarial system than with the values or ethics of …