You know our society is fucked up when people seriously think being a criminal defense attorney is like. A moral evil. Like people seriously jump to “wow you defend murderers” as if the majority of “crime” that happens on a daily basis isn’t literally stuff like addicts being caught possessing drugs or homeless people being arrested for loitering or fucking poor women stealing food and clothes for their kids like… the average person is just one or two paychecks away from also being deemed a “criminal” by society but yeah sure you should definitely act like needing to be defended against the state makes you an automatically morally bad person
It’s not a mistake that in popular police procedural dramas legal defense for the suspect is portrayed as comically evil and the viewer is lead to believe that criminal defense gets in the way of police helping people lol
Also, defending the actually horrible and obviously guilty people is also a good thing. The ultimate purpose of defense attorneys is to force police and prosecutors to do their job properly. To make sure that they aren’t just grabbing a convenient scapegoat and railroading them into prison to pad their ‘cases closed’ and convictions stats. To make sure that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ actually fucking means something. If the worst of the worst don’t have basic rights, then none of us do.
