I am glad that I do not work in the legal profession. It must be tough trying to defend someone that you know is guilty, doing your best to find an argument or failing that a technicality that will lead to them being freed. You have the fallback that that is your job - it's your duty to do this or the legal system falls apart, but if you're successful then a murderer or rapist or paedophile might be walking free and even if you're not successful a price is paid in terms of the muck raking and subterfuge that you're forced to employ.
So even if you know that the man you have in front of you has already been convicted for two murders and the victim disappeared yards from his flat and there's plenty more evidence to show that he's guilty and even if he is already serving life sentences for his other crimes, so it would make no real difference to him even if he was found not guilty, you have to come up with an alternative scenario to explain the crime. And though surely the cause is hopeless, you sit down and look at all the possibilities that might exonerate your client. There's not many of them, mainly because he is clearly fucking guilty, but it's your job to find a viable alternative. And all you have is that the father of the victim had a slightly niche interest porn mag, so you feel you have to go with that and so you have no alternative but to put a family through a gruesome public ordeal, because losing their daughter wasn't enough of one in the first place. It's a hopeless punt - no one is going to buy it - but it's your job to try and find some element of doubt in the prosecution's case and this is the only chink of light you can see, so why not? Why not take a big handful of dog shit and rub it in their faces. It's your job. You're only doing your job.
At no point is anything in your brain saying, "Shall we try and think of a different lie? Just so we don't add insult to injury here, just so we can leave the court with a shred of human dignity and manage to lay our heads down in bed tonight and think, "Well I did my best with an impossible argument and it was just about feasible that aliens had beamed that girl into their space craft, but the beam lost power and sent her crashing to the ground miles away and my client was just unlucky to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. They might have bought that? It was as likely as that whole idea of the father having had something to do with it, and on the plus side it wouldn't have dragged a family who've already been through something unimaginable horrific and had nervous breakdowns through a fresh kind of Hell."
I believe that even people guilty of horrible crimes should be given the best defence they can get. But maybe a line was pointlessly crossed this week and I think if I had been the one asked to cross it I might have been tempted to say, "You know what? Fuck this job. I don't need money this badly - can't we go with the alien thing and at least bring a bit of levity to this situation? You know, rather than taking people to the brink of wondering if their already wretched lives are worth living." But I guess that's why I am a comedian, doing half my work for no money, rather than a lawyer.
As I say I'm glad it isn't me who has to work in that profession. But I wonder if the person who decided on going down that line of defence will ever have any second thoughts about whether they did the right thing because that is their professional duty or whether they might start to question whether they are just a horrible person who has done something unnecessary and awful and that maybe they should have a long sit down and think about who they are and what they're doing and their culpability in creating an awful situation. I think they will allow themselves to feel no qualms about it whatsoever - they might even be congratulating themselves on a job well done. And if they genuinely think that the scenario they envisaged was a real possibility and that their client was innocent then they can sleep soundly at night. But if they don't for a second think that then I would hope that they might just think for a second about what they have become.
Although maybe I am living in my own kind of dream world if I think a lawyer might even have a shred of decency. And I just wonder if we could have a law that if a legal team comes up with a defence that is made up to the point of offensiveness that they get to share a percentage of their defendant's sentence in a slightly more extreme version of No Win No Fee. Who's going to complain about locking up lawyers?
