Why good lawyers should happen to bad people
One of Trump's defence lawyers represented Roger Stone and Jeffrey Epstein. So what?
Against all odds, Donald Trump has found two suckers…er, lawyers to represent him at his impeachment trial on short notice. For their sake, I hope they were paid up front.
It turns out that Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen have been in the news before, and not necessarily for good reasons:
Castor served as the District Attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, from 2002 to 2008. In 2005, Castor declined to prosecute Bill Cosby for the sexual assault of Andrea Constand. He claimed "insufficient, credible, and admissible evidence exists upon which any charge against Mr. Cosby could be sustained beyond a reasonable doubt," according to The Washington Post.
Years later, after Cosby had been accused by more than four dozen women of similar sexual crimes, Castor asserted that he'd verbally offered Cosby an immunity deal in which he declined to prosecute the former sitcom star in criminal court to ensure that Constand would be able to sue him in civil court.
His handling of the Cosby case is widely believed to be responsible for his failed reelection bid in 2015.
[…]
David Schoen, an Atlanta-based criminal defense lawyer, was a part of Trump ally Roger Stone's defense team during his trial for witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and making false statements in relation to Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. Schoen also met with disgraced mogul and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in the days before Epstein hanged himself in prison in August 2019.
Schoen has claimed that Epstein's death was not actually a suicide.
I have no idea what Castor knew about the Cosby case in 2005, and whether it really was winnable at the time. Just because he was convicted years later, after more alleged victims had come forward, doesn’t mean he would have been found guilty then.
That said, it does sound like Cosby was offered a sweetheart deal that never would have available for a less wealthy, famous and connected defendant.
As for Schoen, I find it a bit unnerving to see self-professed liberals and even other criminal defense lawyers going after him for having represented dubious characters like Stone and Epstein:
I, too, am shocked that a high-profile criminal defense attorney may have represented guilty people in court. And I’m sure Tribe, the Ben Matlock of Harvard, has won every case he’s ever worked on.
You know who else has defended alleged “sex predators” in court? Me. None of them were famous, but they were facing serious charges with potentially serious punishments, and I make no apologies for doing my duty to the court and making the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
That doesn’t mean a lawyer can do anything in the course of representing their clients. If you put a witness on the stand knowing he’s going to lie, you should be sanctioned and possibly even disbarred. If you trample people while running toward the news cameras so you can put on a show for television, you’re opening yourself up for public criticism.
We’ll see if Schoen actually ends up representing Trump during his impeachment trial. It will not surprise me at all if he and Castor bail out at the last minute. If the ex-President wants them to do something really unethical - imagine that! - and they go along with it, have at them.
But just because Schoen represented some shitty people doesn’t bother me. If no one is willing to defend shitty people in court, you’re officially in an authoritarian state.
Here’s the thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old social media postings about the Rothschilds’ super-powered space laser starting wildfires in California: in theory, you can say something like that without being antisemitic. Hey, she never actually said anything about all Jewish people, just about this one Jewish family that happens to control the entire world.
In practice…99.9% of the people bringing up the Rothschilds as boogeymen and puppet-masters of the universe are using the Rothschilds as a substitute for teh Joooooooooos. This is usually the case when people talk about “Soros” or “Zionists” or “financiers,” too.
Also, Marjorie Greene the QAnon Queen “liked” a Tweet that said the Mossad was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot. Hey, it’s just criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, right?
Yair Rosenberg, in Tablet, tries to explain why, for conspiracy theorists, it always comes back to the Jews:
The answer is that as long as there are conspiracy theorists seeking scapegoats to blame for the nation’s problems, there will be anti-Semites. That’s because anti-Semitism is the world’s biggest and most durable conspiracy theory. It constructs itself as the ultimate explanation for how the world works, and blames powerful shadowy Jewish figures for all problems. This conspiratorial mindset invariably demonizes any Jews who accumulate wealth or status—from the Rothschilds to George Soros to the state of Israel—though it is not limited to them.
The reason figures like the Rothschilds or the fictional Elders of Zion remain salient targets even today is that any conspiracy theorist seeking someone to blame for the world’s ills is just one Google search away from centuries of literature telling them that that someone is “the Jews.” In other words, you might start out as free agent conspiracy theorist with no particular problem with Jews, but the deeper you dive into this world, the more likely you'll ultimately land on Jewish people as the ultimate culprits. Many conspiracy theories have followed this trajectory to anti-Semitism, from David Icke’s bizarre ravings about Illuminati lizard people and “Rothschild Zionists” to QAnon today.
Simply put, once a person like Greene has decided that an invisible hand is behind the world’s problems, it’s only a matter of time before they decide it belongs to an invisible Jew.
Beyond explaining the thought process of cranks, why does this matter? Because it helps us identify people with anti-Semitic mindsets—and tells us how to reduce their numbers. As we’ve seen, individuals who are prone to conspiracy theories, whatever their personal ideology, are most susceptible to anti-Semitic appeals. Which means that a key component of any effort to counter anti-Semitism must entail combating conspiracy theories and the simplistic thinking that underlies them. Teaching people to understand the world in all its complexity, rather than default to superficial explanations, inoculates them against the reductive arguments of anti-Semites—no matter where they encounter them.
Until we do that, though, we could settle for not electing them to Congress.
Speaking of insane Congresswomen from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney, who made a name for herself promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories in Congress during the W era, has come around to hating the Jews so much she’ll even go on white-supremacist online talk shows to talk about it.
McKinney is African-American.
She’s not the only old-school 9/11 troofer who’s graduated to unabashed antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Paul Craig Roberts and Kevin Barrett have gone all in. Conspiracy theories are the gateway drug, but eventually you’re freebasing hatred in its purest form.
This is amazing unless it’s fake, in which case you didn’t see it here:
I don’t get why anyone would judge a lawyer based simply on whether they defended a guilty person, even or especially someone guilty of serious crimes. Court should be about finding facts and making decisions on the basis of those facts. Finding and presenting the relevant facts in a manner that bests assists the court in making well-informed decisions is a job for a lawyer. If I had to guess - and I do, since I’m poorly informed on the subject - the cases involving guilty defendants would probably outnumber those with innocent defendants overall. Innocent or not, defendants have a limited ability to access information and gather facts compared to an attorney, who is equipped and experienced to do the job. Not to mention that court would probably be havoc if only innocent people had legal representation. Even bad clients can be represented in an ethical manner.