I thank you for your kind remarks but I must register my dissent from your statement that criminal defense lawyers seek to steer jurors away from the truth.

Leaving aside that your statement is simply not so, it assumes that all defendants are guilty. From my time as a criminal defense lawyer, I can report that most defendants are guilty — but that just raises the question of how many innocent people you are prepared to convict to smoke out all the guilty ones according to the odds?

There’s a subsidiary question that requires a tiny bit of esoteric knowledge. Of those that are “not guilty” as opposed to “innocent” (which are very different concepts), many are guilty of something other than that crime the government has charged, raising the question whether it’s fair to convict a defendant for a crime other than the one for which she is on trial.

Now, if you will forgive me for springing the trap on your leg….I have just done something very like what you did. I drew a distinction between not guilty and innocent in a manner that begs the question I tee up in that paragraph. If there is not evidence to prove each element of an offense defined by statute, the defendant is innocent. So why should it matter if I shot your horse last month when I’m on trial for shooting your cow last week?

If there is evidence to prove each element of the offense but critical parts of the evidence are not admissible, the defendant is not guilty. Whether she’s innocent is a different question. Whoa, don’t lawyers obstruct getting at the truth when they move to suppress evidence?

Not usually. Most of the reasons evidence would be inadmissible are reasons to distrust the truth value of the evidence. The ones that get in the newspaper are the ones where the seizure was unlawful so we suppress evidence with high truth value in the service of privacy, which American justice holds to be a higher value — putting American justice in a minority of jurisdictions world wide.

A lawyer’s job in the defense role is exactly the same as a lawyer’s job in the prosecuting role: to put forward the narrative that accounts for all the facts in a manner that leads to the conclusion that benefits the client. Note that what the lawyer thinks does not enter into it. The lawyer may very well have no clue what really happened. The lawyer may “know” his client is guilty because of matters received under attorney-client privilege. The lawyer may have as strong an opinion as is possible without direct knowledge that his client is innocent. There is no way to certainty regarding innocence but, for the same reason, there is no way to certainty regarding guilt. IT DOESN’T MATTER. His duty is the same.