To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.
The criminal defense attorney is misunderstood if not despised by most of society. It doesn't matter if we believe in our adversarial system and the ideal that everyone charged with a crime is entitled to a vigorous defense. Ideals give away to reality - defense lawyers working loopholes and angles to get their clients off.
And again, we're kind of trying to be in that place, that's just so absurd and irreverent and hysterical and it's something that at our company we're kind of, we're so irreverent about everything, we're sort of irreverent about the establishment, we're irreverent about civilization, we're irreverent about philosophy, we're irreverent about religion.
Valentine's Day is one of those tricky celebrations where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you love it, you're buying into a holiday created to sell greeting cards, bad bouquets, and shoddy love-themed stuffed animals. And if you're opposed to it, you're considered lonely and single and have clearly never had a valentine.
One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry's perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country.
When something like this [2003 invasion of Iraq] takes place, the international law professionals have a complicated task. There is a fringe that just tells the truth: Look, it's a violation of international law. But most have to construct complex arguments to justify it as defense counsel. That's basically their job, defense counsel for state power.
I started off as a prosecutor and I would be sitting there, waiting for the defense attorney to come, and they would either bypass me because they would assume that I'm not the attorney or they would assume that I was the legal secretary or a paralegal - never the attorney.
What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.
In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity.
It doesn't seem that long ago to me that the word 'irreverent' seemed affixed to my name. 'Irreverent newcomer.' I went from irreverent to venerable in what seems to me like the blink of an eye.
This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It's lonely. It's small. It's isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it.
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned.
Your assumption, to be effective, cannot be a single isolated act, it must be a maintained attitude of the wish fulfilled.
My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.
I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet 'for sale', who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society.