"The defendant wants to hide the truth because he's generally guilty. The defense attorney's job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth"
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Dershowitz isn’t defending defense lawyers so much as stripping their work down to its least flattering mechanical core: guilt is common, truth is dangerous, and the courtroom is an arena where “truth” is not the product so much as the casualty. The sting comes from the blunt inversion of civic mythology. We tell ourselves trials are truth-finding rituals; he recasts them as truth-management systems, where narrative, procedure, and doubt are tools for survival.
The specific intent is provocation with a lawyer’s shrug. By asserting that defendants “generally” want to hide the truth because they’re “generally guilty,” he normalizes the moral compromise at the heart of adversarial justice. The defense attorney’s job, in this framing, isn’t to discover what happened but to prevent the state from proving it cleanly enough to punish. It’s a deliberate conflation of “truth” with “conviction,” and it weaponizes the public’s suspicion that high-powered lawyering is less about innocence than about escape velocity.
The subtext is institutional: the system is designed to tolerate guilty people going free because the alternative is a state that can steamroll the innocent. Dershowitz’s line quietly invites you to remember the real client in the room isn’t only the defendant; it’s the Constitution. Still, the phrasing is a dare, bordering on self-indictment, and it lands like cynicism because it names what many jurors fear: that courtroom “justice” often means whoever tells the better story within the rules wins. Context matters here too: coming from a celebrity defense lawyer with a long record of polarizing cases, it reads as both candor and branding, a bleak realism packaged as professional honesty.
The specific intent is provocation with a lawyer’s shrug. By asserting that defendants “generally” want to hide the truth because they’re “generally guilty,” he normalizes the moral compromise at the heart of adversarial justice. The defense attorney’s job, in this framing, isn’t to discover what happened but to prevent the state from proving it cleanly enough to punish. It’s a deliberate conflation of “truth” with “conviction,” and it weaponizes the public’s suspicion that high-powered lawyering is less about innocence than about escape velocity.
The subtext is institutional: the system is designed to tolerate guilty people going free because the alternative is a state that can steamroll the innocent. Dershowitz’s line quietly invites you to remember the real client in the room isn’t only the defendant; it’s the Constitution. Still, the phrasing is a dare, bordering on self-indictment, and it lands like cynicism because it names what many jurors fear: that courtroom “justice” often means whoever tells the better story within the rules wins. Context matters here too: coming from a celebrity defense lawyer with a long record of polarizing cases, it reads as both candor and branding, a bleak realism packaged as professional honesty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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