Lawyers should not represent clients they know are guilty

Lawyers should not represent clients they know are guilty

 Introduction

A lawyer is a court officer whose role is to provide defence and make sure that his or her client is not convicted. In this profession, a lawyer has a legal duty to conform to all requirements of law when providing professional services to clients and to the court (Siegel & Worrall, 2012, p. 24).  On top of that, has an ethical obligation to ensure that he or she maintains the highest standards ethical conduct. Sometimes, a lawyer is confronted with a situation whereby he or she knows that his or her client is guilty. In such a case, a lawyer can proceed to save the client if that is the first and the only duty. However, there is a high probability that the client is going to commit a crime known as perjury and the lawyer handling the case fail to uphold integrity of the court. If this happens, the lawyer will be violating ethical obligations to the court, as explained in the following section.

Discussion

As mentioned earlier, lawyers regularly face situations in which they are required to defend clients whom they already know are guilty. As Banks (2004, p. 85) explains, every lawyer has an obligation to follow any steps that are legally or ethically permissible and serve the best interest of his or her clients. However, in a situation where a lawyer is confident that the client is guilty, what is ethically permissible does not coincide with the best interests of the client. A good example is a situation in which a lawyer is representing a client who stabbed and killed a drug dealer. Both the client and the lawyer agree to convince the court that the client thought that the diseased was armed and killed him or her in the course of self defence. To strengthen this testimony, the client decides to falsely claim that he or she had seen something metallic in the hands of the victim before stabbing him or her. The client then proceeds to make such an assertion unde.............