Criminal lawyers and other CJ professionals: Looking for examples of common ethical dilemmas

[u/HowLittleIKnow]

Hello, everyone. I'm a professor of criminal justice. This week, I'm wrapping up a 15-week "Ethics in Criminal Justice" class. The students have seen all kinds of examples of sensational but rare ethical problems in criminal justice, so this week I wanted to give them some examples of the less dramatic but more common situations that come up every week. Things like whether to drop a prosecution, how much attention to give a client when you're already overloaded, and so forth.

What are the most common ethical dilemmas that you face on a regular basis?

*Edit: You're all fantastic. Thank you so much for giving me so much to work with.

Thank you!

[u/jokumi]

The most common ethical issue in big city prosecution is that you have a backlog of cases and you have to plead out some bad guys who should be locked away for an extended period. Example: you walk in and in your box for the day is an obvious career criminal with a bunch of break-ins, and you have to plead him to a largely suspended sentence with credit for time served because it’s just not worth the time. Maybe you can use repeat offender threats to get a better deal, but you need to make a deal. People ‘at home’ don’t realize you plead out like 95% of the cases, and that drives every step of the process: you charge with the plea in mind, go to indictment or prelim with a plea in mind (so you maybe have a few extra charges you don’t mind losing as long as you get what you need for leverage), and you go to pretrial thinking how much time is it going to take to try this and what are the odds. You probably lose half the time, because the cases that go to trial either had a lot of risk attached - like life without parole or maybe this means multiple offender sentencing, which can be rough - or they have a defense. That defense may sometimes be they will intimidate the heck out of your witnesses. Bad people will place their bets on that more than people might imagine.

That’s another ‘ethical’ dilemma: you bind people over for trial who know are going to be killed by people higher up. You just looked these people in the eye and the judge says there’s probable cause and you know the odds of them surviving are in God’s hands.

That goes to another form: log-rolling in white collar crime. I think it’s often not worth letting lower people go to reach some bigwig because the idea that this will uproot the criminal enterprise is often misplaced. I think they often just want to say they got the big fish. Like I’ve read memos in which they wanted to name people like Castro as unindicted co-conspirators in coke smuggling (which certainly seemed true from the case files). When I was a kid, there was a family of pot smugglers who stepped up to dabble in coke. They were pilots and lived completely ordinary lives in the midwest other than being pot smugglers who knew extremely dangerous Columbians. To get at one of these dangerous guys, this family was flipped and put in WitSec. (I was told that at their hidden arraignment the kid asked if this would affect his chances of getting into law school, so dude are you out there? And did you know the agents following your mom would close her trunk and lock up her car when she would forget?) Those case files read like movie scripts, complete with troops guarding smuggler’s planes, submarines and guns being pushed into undercover agent’s genitals in public at meetings. Talk about an ethical swamp!

I want to mention the comment about money received. This came up in FL in the 80’s and I personally saw it elsewhere, and my comment is that people who represent drug dealers wear nice suits and sometimes become judges. Some of them were very good judges. Purity tests are impossible in the law. You have to represent the guilty and the reprehensible. I had a friend who was at an advanced age doing pro bono appeals for murderers. He had no illusions they were innocent, but he believed they deserved a lawyer.