Quotes & Sayings About Defense Lawyers

I think lawyers have a fidelity to the system itself that's always got to be with them, and indeed, most of the defense lawyers I know observe that. — Scott Turow

The foundation is an aggressive, well-financed p.r. machine adept at manipulating the press, harassing its critics, and mobilizing a diverse army of psychiatrists, outspoken academics, expert defense witnesses, litigious lawyers, Freud bashers, critics of psychotherapy, and devastated parents. With a budget of $750,000 a year from members and outside supporters, the foundation's reach far exceeds its actual membership of about 3,000. The Freyds and the members know who we are, but the press knows less than it realizes about who they are, what drives them, or why they've been so successful. — Mike Stanton

Lawyers claim that their clients have been grossly mistreated, which is what criminal defense lawyers are paid to do. — Ken Starr

In college, I wanted to be Perry Mason, the hottest defense lawyer around. Then I realized that defense lawyers represented the scum of the earth, and most of their clients were guilty. Kinda blew the image for me. In my sophomore year, I took a journalism course and was hooked. I discovered investigative reporting, and soon realized I could be judge, jury, and prosecutor. So who needed to be a lawyer — Rick Pullen

There was polite laughter in the courtroom. Bosch noticed that the attorneys
prosecution and defense
dutifully joined in, a couple of them overdoing it. It had been his experience that while in open court a judge could not possibly tell a joke that the lawyers did not laugh at. — Michael Connelly

I'd learned very quickly that I could create a fair amount of chaos with very little effort. Some defense lawyers call it "making the State come off their mountain to fight on my molehill." I just called it fun. — Scott Pratt

[Barack] Obama's executive amnesty has been frozen via a stay by a judge on the appellate court. You remember, this is the judge that discovered the Defense Department lawyers were lying to him in open court, and instead of actually sanctioning them, he demanded that they go to a new ethics course to learn the proper behavior and decorum and the law in court, that you just can't lie with impunity to a judge. — Rush Limbaugh

Self-defense is the clearest of all laws; and for this reason - the lawyers didn't make it. — Douglas William Jerrold

Imposition of the death penalty is arbitrary and capricious. Decision of who will live and who will die for his crime turns less on the nature of the offense and the incorrigibility of the offender and more on inappropriate and indefensible considerations: the political and personal inclinations of prosecutors; the defendant's wealth, race and intellect; the race and economic status of the victim; the quality of the defendant's counsel; and the resources allocated to defense lawyers. — Gerald Heaney

In the military, JAG lawyers switch sides. One day a prosecutor, the next day a defense lawyer. Maybe they should make civilian prosecutors do the same thing. Many are plagued with a disease I call emotional scurvy. Instead of lacking vitamin C, they've been shortchanged of empathy. — Paul Levine

I'm amazed at how [police officers] don't want to come to court. They want to make the case and they want it to get prosecuted, but they don't want to come testify. Sorry, but the ultimate way of writing your report is telling it to a jury. When I was a defense lawyer, I used to think all police officers were liars, but now I find that there are only a few. Most of them are pretty straightforward and do a good job. But there are some, and if I know that they are liars or I know they tend to exaggerate, I try to take that into consideration when I'm dealing with their cases. — Mark Baker

But I have a flash of Good News from the Police Atrocity front, which is heating up in Denver. ... Stand back! Good News is rare in the Criminal Justice System, but every once in a while you find it, and this is one of those times. To wit: the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has formally entered the Appeals trial of young Lisl Auman - the girl who remains locked up in a cell at the Colorado State Prison for the Rest of Her Life with No Possibility of Parole for a bogus crime she was never even Accused of committing. She is a living victim of a cold-blooded political trial that will cast a long shadow on Denver for many years to come. Lisl is the only person ever convicted in the United States for Felony Murder who was in police custody when the crime happened. — Hunter S. Thompson

It was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But ... lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense. — Noam Chomsky

This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same - bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors. — John Grisham

By making defense lawyers more central to criminal litigation than they already were and by dramatically enlarging the range of legal claims they could raise on their clients' behalf, Warren's Court increased the gap between rich and poor defendants-and, given the racial distribution of poverty in midcentury America, between black and white defendants as well. Because the time and quality of defense counsel mattered more than before, those defendants who could buy better quality attorneys and pay them to work more hours were more advantaged than before. Relatively speaking, their poorer counterparts grew more disadvantaged. The justice system grew less egalitarian through the Supreme Court's efforts to make it more so.
The — William J. Stuntz

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price. — William Landay