Probable Cause

Scott Greenfield’s blog, Simple Justice, is probably the only legal blog where I try never to miss a post.  If I fall behind, it bugs me, and when I get the chance, I’ll catch up by spending an hour or more reading every post I’ve missed.  One of these days, I’m going to continue digging back into the older posts, from before I knew about his blog, and read all those, too.  This is not to say that I agree with everything he says, but everything he says definitely makes me think.  And I agree with enough of it that I wish there was someone like him in my jurisdiction to mentor me.  (Scott’s been practicing a lot longer than I have.)

One of his posts from today — A Blog That Shouldn’t — gives me the chance to talk more about something that matters very much to me.  It concerns the question of defending guilty people.

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A young person — I’m not going to provide any more identifying information than that individual did — left a comment to my article about “Defending Innocent People.” The comment is interesting on many different levels.

One of the things that really stood out, though, was this statement:

I do agree that a lot of people convicted are in fact guilty, and even if not for that particular crime than [sic] they probably did something before that and somehow got away with it.

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A large number — no doubt many people — arrested by the police are guilty.  Often enough, they’re even actually guilty of the crime for which they have been arrested.  No matter how much of a true believer one might be as a criminal defense attorney, this much has to be admitted.

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