Examples Of Selfish Justice

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The media often portrays a negative image of lawyers and judges. The way that lawyers and judges act in media can be described as selfish justice. The meaning of selfish justice refers to the lack of concern that lawyers and judges can have regarding the fairness of a trial and the consequences that a ruling can have on another human life. To clarify, in most crime television shows and even in reality, an innocent person can easily be found guilty in court if the district attorney has enough evidence to prove the defendant crime and if the defense lawyer is not able to counter the evidence. However, many district attorneys as represented on television do not exhibit honesty when it comes to presenting evidence. For example, many episodes showcase …show more content…

Most judges ignore and misunderstand the law or the rules of the courtroom. In these show, judges tend also allow irrelevant evidence even when they know it’s not right. For example, in the TV show “How To Get Away With Murder”, Annalise Keating, the law professor and defense lawyer of the case, obtains an illegal document to disprove the witness testimony in the first episode. However, the prosecution lawyer was not familiar with the document. When he could not find the document in the case file, he objected as the document was not part of the “discovery file.” Thus, it was illegally obtained evidence. Ms. Keating then explains to the judge that she obtained the document from the attorney who had been previously representing her client. The judge seemed to agree with Ms. Keating’s argument, even after the prosecution lawyer claimed that Ms. Keating obtained the document illegally. Although the document was obtained illegal, the judge still allowed the document to be treated as evidence. This relates to selfish justice because the judge has chosen to bypass an important rule of the justice system. The article of “How to Tell a Judge He Screwed Up” by Robert Gettleman features a judge who talks about his experiences in the U.S. District Court in Chicago Illinois, and how judges often make mistakes when they preside over a trial. While the judge in “How to Get Away with Murder” does not admit to making …show more content…

Most clients don’t want justice but instead they want their lawyers to settle their case so they can be compensated in a short amount of time. In the same episode of “The Defenders”,Morelli and Kaczmaric also represented Sonia, an Asian woman who had suffered from an overdose of Epinephrine. Morelli and Kaczmaric discovered a case that was similar to Sonia’s and thus, would be able to support her lawsuit. If Morelli and Kaczmaric won the case, then Sonia would not need to go to trial. Instead she would have received a compensation check for her damages. However, Sonia doesn’t agree with the lawyer’s decisions because she needs to pay her medical bills and personal expenses. Thus, she wanted her case to go to trial first. Because Sonia didn’t agree with her lawyer’s decision, she decided to hire another lawyer to represent her case. As a result, her new lawyer lost her case as there was not enough evidence to settle her case. In the article of “Getting What You Deserve” by Jim McElhaney, a Hostetler distinguished scholar in trial practice at Case Western Reserve University School of Law Cleveland, describes how lawyers are responsible for explaining to their clients that they need to be fair on their decisions. McElhaney states “one of the most difficult jobs of precession can be trying to convince your own client to be reasonable” determines how clients are not always fair in agreeing with

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