Leave it to the Bush administration. Not only have the Bushies increased the likelihood that ordinary Americans may be charged with crimes, they now seek to destroy those persons opportunities for legal help once they are charged.
According to Cully Stimson, "I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that (major US legal firms) are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks."
Stimson is talking about nothing less than outing high-profile attorneys’ defense of those accused of terrorism to legal firms’ corporate clients who pay huge retainers for legal counsel. The hope is that corporate chiefs will threaten to take their business elsewhere if their current legal firms continue to represent accused terrorist.
So many problems with this. As Eugene Volokh a conservative lawyer explains in an article:
(3) But it seems extremely unlikely that those lawyers who represent Guantanamo detainees do so because they support jihad against America. Rather, I take it that they are doing this chiefly because they think that their actions may (a) reduce the risk of factual error (continued detention of detainees who aren't really guilty), (b) reduce the risk of legal and constitutional violations (deprivation of what the lawyer thinks are important due process norms), or (c) reduce the possible indirect harm that such erosion of due process norms can cause to others in the future. And they believe that, when a legal process is available — as the Supreme Court has held that it is — the legal system is benefited by having trained, qualified lawyers involved on both sides of the process, so that courts and other tribunals see an adversarial presentation with the best cases made for both sides. ...
It strikes me as especially wrong for the government to try to drum up financial pressure that would deter lawyers from playing this role. Again, the premise of our legal system is that the courts, and not just litigants, are benefited from quality legal advocacy. If the government frightens away lawyers who are on the other side, it will get an unfair advantage in the judicial process, shortchange the judiciary, and (when it comes to decisions that set precedents) potentially yield legal rules that will give too little protection for the rest of us, and not just the Guantanamo detainees.
(5) Finally, quite aside from the argument that businesses should pressure law firms to stop representing detainees, isn't there something troubling with the motivation that Stimson is urging? He's not even saying that corporate CEOs should pressure firms because the CEOs are patriots, or because they hate terrorists, or because they want to prevent future terrorist attacks. It's because the terrorists hit their bottom line.
Is he really appealing not to the CEOs' patriotism, or anger over mass murder, but to their anger that terrorists cost business money? To look at the flip side, should construction and security contractors who made money (perfectly honorably, I should stress) as a result of the terrorist attacks start giving more business to law firms who are representing detainees, on the theory that "those firms are representing the very terrorists who [benefited] their bottom line back in 2001"? Yes, CEOs should surely look out for the bottom line; that's their job. But this strikes me as a context in which the concerns about past impacts on the bottom line should be the least relevant.
Here are some other issues to consider. First is the large number of detainees that have been set free because they have been falsely accused. Where are such defendants supposed to turn for legal help? If the government feels that it can’t play on level field with the best defense attorneys this nation has to offer, maybe it needs to look into recruiting a better caliber of lawyer. Using ideology as a criterion for placing someone in a position has given us an Attorney General who pretty much believes that you can do anything you want to someone during an interrogation as long as you don’t actually kill them. With wacky interpretations like that it’s no wonder the government lawyers have a hard time making their cases.
More disturbing than that is the idea of blacklisting legal firms because someone doesn’t like some of the firm’s clients. Why stop with terrorism suspects? What major US corporation would want to be associated with rapist or child molesters or drug users or murders? The eventual outcome would be that no one accused of a crime could receive legal counsel. It would be a prosecutors dream, because we all know that police and prosecutors never violate anyone’s civil rights.
The figure of justice is usually represented as being blindfolded. Stimson’s comments are an over-the-top effort to put a big fat thumb on the scales that justice carries.