After countless legal discussions over the years, there's no one more qualified to address this topic than my good friend, Neil G. I'm thrilled that he agreed to contribute a guest post to our blog today. The Sara Boone situation has created an appellate snarl; she’s going to have countless appeal avenues, I wonder if she’ll recognize them. Why am I not surprised, Florida? But I’ll weigh in with my own two cents sometime in the near future. In the meantime, Enjoy:
Being your own attorney is known as going "pro se," a Latin term meaning "for oneself, on one's own behalf." Everyone tends to think they are their best advocate, but that's seldom the case. When I had to handle my appeals pro se (since there's no right to counsel on many appeals), I discovered I had to bifurcate myself into two people:
The first is the client, the angry, sour-grapes convict who knows more about his own case than anyone else will, and whose indignant emotional investment makes it hard for him to write briefs objectively—without turning them into a cudgel to beat up on the corrupt system. (Even most Americans recognize that the justice system is inherently flawed and corrupt.)
The second person I become must disassociate from the client. I have to step back from the emotion, identify the errors the court made, address those objectively, and stay on point—dispassionately and respectfully (much as it pains me to say "The Honorable Judge so-and-so," when every attorney I know agrees that judge screwed the pooch). That's hard to do! It’s really difficult not to sabotage your own success because of angry investment in how you've been wronged.
The law is not about what's right or wrong. It's not about truth or lies, innocence or guilt, or any of that propaganda. The American legal process is an "adversarial system," one where the objective is to "win." The prosecutor doesn't care if you're guilty: he'll strive to win a conviction by whatever means the legal system allows him to get away with (and it allows quite a bit!). The pro se litigant seldom understands this, desperately trying to appeal to the court's nonexistent sense of right or wrong, "because it's just wrong!" Indignation causes the pro se defendants to ramble, in ways that lose sight of the legal technicalities. And technicalities are how appeals are won. When critics say, "He just won on a technicality," it belies the fact that the vast majority of appeals that prevail do so entirely on technical/procedural errors. That is our system.
Your lawyer knows this. You, the defendant, do not. You'll figure it out too late, long after you fired your attorney and went pro se because you thought you were right, and surely the court would care about something as banal as the truth.