Editor’s note: Timothy C. Parlatore is a CNN legal commentator, criminal lawyer, managing partner of the Parlatore Law Firm, and Navy veteran. He has represented clients in high-profile cases in various courts across the country. TThe opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion On CNN.
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Just before the verdict was handed down on Thursday in former President Donald Trump’s forgery trial, some in the legal profession criticized attorney Todd Blanche for the audacity he displayed in defending Trump. The criticism follows reports in recent years that many law firms have turned down the opportunity to represent Trump for political reasons.
Courtesy of Tim Parlatore
Tim Parlatore
While private lawyers are free to accept or reject clients for a variety of reasons, disagreeing with a criminal client’s political views is no excuse for the client not to hire the lawyer. It is contrary to the American justice system and the principle of equality under the law for defendants with politically unpopular views to be incarcerated without adequate defense. And had Trump not been represented by a lawyer of his own choosing in his Manhattan criminal trial, his eventual guilty verdict would have been shaky.
CNN senior legal analyst Ellie Honig noted last month that many lawyers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where Honig and Blanche once worked, have asked, “Why would Todd do this? Why did he take on this case?” Honig’s response was perfect: “My answer is, generally speaking, since when have we become amazed at lawyers who defend defendants? It’s a job, it’s what our system expects.”
To be clear, I am not an apologist for Blanche, who I worked with briefly on the Trump campaign, but while some have questioned Blanche’s motives and political ambitions, that does not necessarily mean that he or any other lawyer should not have taken on this case.
This “pearl clutching” was evident in a problematic op-ed piece written by former prosecutor Elliot B. Jacobson in the New York Law Journal. Jacobson argued that it would be unethical for Blanche, or indeed any private lawyer, to defend Trump in his criminal trial. “Whatever the marginal utility of defending Trump in protecting constitutional values and the criminal justice system in general, the damage to the Constitution and its institutions would be far greater if he were acquitted and became president for a second time,” Jacobson wrote. But the article, which argues that private lawyers who can choose their clients should refuse to defend Trump, makes a very misguided political argument.
Although Jacobson begins his article touting his bona fides by prosecuting people close to Trump and volunteering as an unpaid prosecutor to investigate Trump and the Trump Organization after his retirement, he is essentially saying that it is wrong for a private attorney like Blanche to represent Trump because he wants him to lose the election. But no prosecutor should put partisan politics above constitutional principles. Unfortunately, acknowledging such blatant partisanship by a career prosecutor also lends credence to the Trump campaign’s rhetoric that prosecutors are engaging in “election interference” and a “witch hunt.”
Our criminal justice system is only as good as the people who administer it. While most prosecutors try to do the right thing, we cannot ignore the fact that they are imperfect human beings and that some engage in misconduct. Our adversarial system is designed to protect people from abuse by giving each side an attorney to ensure their rights are protected. As the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Firing the lawyers is a step toward a totalitarian form of government.”
Others have pointed out that some of the lawyers who represented Trump, including Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, found themselves in legal hot water. But this, too, misses the point. There is a big difference between campaign lawyers (which put them at risk) and criminal lawyers who defend their clients in court. Successful criminal lawyers defend all sorts of interesting and sometimes unsavory characters and are not tempted to engage in unethical or illegal behavior. In my own experience representing Trump during the January 6th incident and the Mar-a-Lago investigation, I never felt pressured to sacrifice my integrity.
Our Founding Fathers understood principles that Trump’s critics don’t: John Adams, the fervent patriot who helped write the Declaration of Independence and served as the first Vice President and second President of the United States, agreed to take on the deeply unpopular role of a British soldier accused of murder in the Boston Massacre.
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In doing so, he said, “The council should be the last thing the accused should want.” [i.e. lack] He continued, “In my opinion, the legal profession must be independent and impartial at all times and under all circumstances,” but “those whose lives are at stake should receive the defense they prefer.” He called the Boston Massacre “a case of greater importance than has ever been tried in any court or country in the world,” and therefore all lawyers should adhere to the highest legal principles, stating to him that “in such cases, no artifice or excuse, no sophistry or subterfuge, nothing more than the facts, the evidence, and the law warrant.”
Our criminal justice system does not need to be less partisan, nor does it need to be more partisan. Although I have the public title of “former Trump lawyer,” I personally do not identify with either party orthodoxy and enjoy representing clients on both sides of the political spectrum. Furthermore, I believe that no honest lawyer should publicly call themselves a “conservative lawyer” or a “liberal lawyer.” Even if a lawyer holds conservative or liberal political beliefs, they should not let those beliefs change how they represent their clients or affect their analysis of the facts and law.
