08.08.06
Lawyers Behaving Badly
Defense lawyers have a less than stellar reputation - they (we?) are considered unscrupulous and willing to defend the most heinous crimes for a pile of money. Public defenders have, perhaps, a worse reputation - we are sometimes thought to be the sad saps willing to settle for poorly paying jobs because we aren’t smart enough to get a better job. Last year, when talking about a public defender interview I had, a friend said, “Well, if you can’t get a job with the public defender’s office, that’s pretty sad.” And an rerun of Law & Order that I watched yesterday featured a lawyer who got “stuck” with Legal Aid and reveled in representing a serial killer as a way to boost his career to fame and fortune. If you ever decide to throw this particular notion my way, I may have to eviscerate you. But every once in a while, a defense lawyer does something so stupid that it seems to validate the piss-poor image of the defense bar. Like, say, showing up drunk to a trial in which a client is facing life imprisonment.
Las Vegas defense attorney Joseph Caramango showed up an hour-and-a-half late to his client’s trial, smelling of alcohol, slurring his words, and accompanied by a woman that he had just met at a bar. Caramango claimed that he was not drunk, but that he had been in a car accident, hit his head, and didn’t contact the police about it. He said he was ready to go forward with trial but the judge wasn’t buying it - she declared a mistrial and ordered him to take a breathalyzer. His blood alcohol level was .075, just below the so-called “legal” limit.
Winner.
