Staples Hughes a North Carolina lawyer, was on the witness stand and about to disclose a secret he believed would free an innocent man from prison. But the judge told Mr. Hughes to stop.
“If you testify,” Judge Thompson said at a hearing last year on the prisoner’s request for a new trial, “I will be compelled to report you to the state bar. Do you understand that?”
Mr. Hughes recalled last week, “it seemed to me at that point ethically permissible and morally imperative that I spill the beans.”
The Cumberland County Superior Court in Fayetteville, did not see it that way, and some experts in legal ethics agree. The obligation to keep a client’s secrets is so important, they say, that it survives death and may not be violated even to cure a grave injustice — for example, the imprisonment for 26 years of another man, in Illinois, who was freed just last month.
A lawyer’s broad duty to keep clients’ confidences is the bedrock on which the justice system is built, they argue. “Lawyers are not undercover informants,” said Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal ethics at New York University. Indeed, said Steven Lubet, who teaches legal ethics at Northwestern, few clients would confess to their lawyers if they knew the lawyers might some day choose to disclose that information.
In the Illinois case, Dale Coventry and W. Jameson Kunz waited 26 years to speak up about a client’s confession that freed Alton Logan, who had been serving a life sentence for murder. The lawyers said their client had given them permission to talk once he was dead. Last month, Mr. Logan was granted a new trial and freed on bond.
A Virginia lawyer, Leslie P. Smith, waited 10 years to disclose a secret that may save Daryl R. Atkins from execution, acting only after the Virginia State Bar gave him permission to speak.
Those lawyers have faced criticism from some laypeople for staying quiet so long. Mr. Hughes, by contrast, was rewarded with a disciplinary complaint for speaking up at all.
Madness!!!
This is the short version of an article on the Book of Joe blog and my first thought is 'typical American stupidity' - but is it. Probably the same idiocy applies here.
So we move to the Berryman case.
When talking about the law the Berryman case is a case in point. This is the bridge, built by the Army on what was supposed to be the farmland of the Berrymans. This the bridge on which a beekeeper lost his life when it collapsed when he was driving across it.
The Berrymans were prosecuted - some say persecuted - for the accident and found at fault. However a final (we hope) judgement has now come out absolving them of the blame. They in the meantime have been bankrupted and suffered healthwise.
Again, the only people who got anything out of it are the lawyers(except of course for the wonderful Bob Moodie).
To me it seemed simple. A bridge was built - it wasn't built correctly so those responsible for building it are at fault. I can't see how anybody could argue if the Auckland Harbour Bridge collapsed due to construction mistakes it would be the Mayor of Aucklands fault.
But our legal system took the view it is the fault of the landowner. Plus as it turned out, the bridge wasn't even on the Beerymans land, although this wasn't realised at the time. However, in mitigation of the Coroners report at the time (as the Judges points out) the Army hid their documents acknowledging that they had made mistakes in the construction.
Years go by and finally commonsense arrives and the fault sheeted home to the right party.
Madness!!!
