No Laughing Matter

Randy Barnett has an extraordinarily lame op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, arguing that the Duke rape case shows how vital to our criminal justice system competent criminal defense lawyers are. This is a fair, indeed important, point to make, but it goes off the rails like you would not believe. Let's set aside the peculiarity of having a former prosecutor pen such a case; presumably a criminal defense lawyer (or former defense lawyer, or -- gasp! -- a public defender) could bring more experience to bear on some of the issues raised by the exonerations, but whatever.

Here's Barnett about halfway through his piece:

Our criminal justice system does not rely solely on the fairness of the police and prosecutors to get things right. In every criminal case, there is a professional whose only obligation is to scrutinize what the police and prosecutor have done. This "professional" is a lawyer. The next time you hear a lawyer joke, maybe you'll think of the lawyers who represented these three boys and it won't seem so funny.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Okay, that bit about the lawyer jokes is odd -- I've never met a single lawyer who's actually been offended by any such jokes -- but hey, it's just an aside! It's not the point of the piece ... right?

Barnett proceeds to go on and on about why defense lawyers are important. He makes what is either a disingenuous or embarrassingly obtuse claim that "some of the same folks who whooped in support of Mr. Nifong's efforts are now bemoaning that it was the supposed wealth of these students' parents that enabled them to mount so effective a defense" -- as if those "same folks" are doing any more than observing the curiously selective outrage on the part of people who, before the Duke case, seemed oddly uninterested in unjust prosecutions or exonerations. And then, in his where-do-we-go-from-here closing paragraph, Barnett winds things down:

Let us not be distracted all over again. The difficult problem of innocent defendants typically arises in run-of-the mill cases where prosecutors acting in good faith have no reason to doubt their guilt. It results in part from the pragmatic presumption of guilt, which leads to inadequate defense lawyering, an indifferent press and an oblivious public. There are no easy solutions to this. But refraining from ridiculing lawyers in general, and criminal defense lawyers in particular, would be a nice start, and one that lies within the power of everyone reading these words.

Seriously? You have prime op-ed space in The Wall Street Journal; you're trying to forcefully make a point about how the criminal justice system needs good defense lawyers in order to work properly; you could talk about, say, increasing the number of public defenders and their salaries; and your proposal is ... stop making lawyer jokes?