This Is the Defense Bar You're Paying For

Isn't the public defender supposed to protect the downtrodden innocent? Apparently, there's more to the agenda.

Let me just lay it out right quick: I spent most of my career as a federal prosecutor, and I have not a few misgivings about the way the criminal defense bar practices law. This is not to say they’re all bad, not at all. Some are heroes — for example, the defense lawyers who exposed the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, in which a corrupt, leftist local prosecutor falsely accused several white lacrosse team players of raping a black stripper. (The prosecutor, Mike Nifong, was later disbarred). The defense lawyer for Kyle Rittenhouse was likewise a hero, having won acquittals on all charges (based on a well-grounded — indeed an obvious — self defense claim) when the defendant found himself wrongly accused mostly as a result of a left wing political hothouse after the Kenosha, Wisconsin race riots.

Defense counsel were heroes for one simple reason: They stood up for the truth. It made a difference to them that their clients were in fact innocent.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works the great majority of the time. Almost all felony defendants (certainly in federal court, where I got my experience) are guilty in the sense any normal person would understand, to wit, they did what the prosecution says they did. But, as the big majority of defense lawyers will tell you, some sheepishly but most proudly, factual guilt simply makes no difference. The object of the defense game is not to establish the truth. It’s to get the best result for the client, and if that involves shading or hiding or massaging the truth, as very often it does, well, that’s how it goes. These are the “ethics” of the profession (just in case you were wondering why lawyers have a less than stellar reputation for honesty — behind labor union leaders and way behind the police).

Some will tell you that this is how it should be, or perhaps must be: Otherwise, what chance does a lone individual have against the power and resources of the state? And what if the state itself is corrupt?

That all sounds good, but it’s not what really goes on. The main reason retained defense counsel act as they do day in and day out is depressingly easy to summarize: The client pays and the truth doesn’t.

That’s not the whole story, of course. There is at least one other very important reason, or so I found over the years, for the frequent indulgence of dishonesty in behalf of the defendant. Defense lawyers tend to view their client as the real victim — of society, capitalism, racism, addiction, bad mental health, bad schools, bad parents (I could go on and on) and generally what they see as an evil Amerika’s callousness and cruelty. The problem is never the client’s behavior, for which there is an endless supply of excuses. The problem in one way or another is society’s behavior. The real culprit is that stuffy, bourgeois, deferred-gratification (and typically racist) nerd so lacking in, ummmmmmm, compassion.

In other words, the real culprit is you. And me.

The main problem with this worldview is that it’s breathtakingly perverted and false. One other problem is that it leaves the actual victim — the girl who got raped or the boy who got hooked on meth or the trusting older person who got swindled out of everything — pretty much unaccounted for. Most of the defense lawyers I ran into just blanked on the real victim. To the extent the real victim appeared in the defense lawyer’s mind at all, it was, to be blunt, as human garbage: Something you’d rather not deal with, something to be taken out to the sidewalk to be hauled to the dump.

That attitude jumped out at me in the story I came across today. There’s more to it, as you’ll see — the more being actual hate — but understanding the attitude of “crime-victim-as-human-garbage” is a helpful predicate in making sense of it.

Here it is, from the New York Post:

A New York County public defender will get to keep her job after apologizing for brazenly tearing down posters of hostages missing in the Israel-Hamas war, her employer said.

Attorney Victoria Ruiz had been captured in a viral video last week ripping down one of the many posters plastered across the Big Apple since the terrorist organization attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

In the clip, Ruiz ignores the person behind the camera who is repeatedly asking, “Why are you taking down pictures of missing children?”

Ruiz was identified as the person tearing down the posters in the video by nonprofit watchdog StopAntisemitism.

When contacted by The Post, the New York County Defender Services condemned Ruiz’s actions as “highly insensitive.”

Well for sure we can’t have “insensitive” stuff going on in these parts! Now a normal person might have said, “unbelievably vile and disgusting,” but we’re not dealing with normal people.

“It has come to our attention that one of our attorneys, Victoria Ruiz, recently attended a public vigil solely in her capacity as a private citizen,” Lupe Todd-Medina, spokesperson for New York County Defender Services, said in a statement to The Post.

“Some of her actions at the event have drawn sharp criticism and we strongly condemn them as highly insensitive.”

You might be wondering where the moral compass has gone with these people, but when what you do every day is try to put guilty and dangerous people back on the street — to do it again, and with no consequences again — it’s a mistake to be looking for a functioning moral compass.

But following an internal investigation into the incident, NYCDS accepted Ruiz’s apology and her promise to “do better.”

“Ms. Ruiz has apologized to those who were hurt or confused by her actions. After an internal review, and a pledge by all involved to do better, we accept this apology and now refocus on the vigorous pursuit of our mission: achieving justice and dignity for every individual we represent,” Todd-Medina said.

I don’t know whether this mostly defies analysis or mostly defies parody — or mostly defies something I don’t even have a word for. First, what was the “internal investigation” other than sitting down with Ms. Ruiz and trying to figure out how to spin this? Second, what would “doing better” mean? Thinking that tortured hostages might be actual human beings? Or, more likely, being at least aware enough to tear down the posters while you’re not being filmed? And what apology is getting talked about? Note that Ms. Ruiz herself has nothing — not a word — to say. Note also that the Defender’s Office wastes no time trying to put it all in the rear view mirror and getting on the the real point, namely, congratulating itself for “achieving justice and dignity.”

Where, one might ask, does this group get its understanding of “justice and dignity”? From the barrel of a Hamas gun while pointed at the head of a three year-old? The Defenders Office statement probably sets a new world record for the hilarious — in its very sick way — debasement of language.

Ruiz didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.

What a surprise!

(In an update, I now see that Ms. Ruiz has left her job, on her own. So far as is being reported, she wasn’t fired).