LET'S PARTY
They enjoy their job.
The adversarial system in action. This attitude is not unusual. It is a contest and winning is all that is important. No matter whether the accused is guilty or innocent the thrill is exactly the same.
A PIECE COPIED FROM PRIVATE EYE MAGAZINE
http://www.private-eye.co.uk
“It’s inevitable that professionals who deal with issues of life and death will make
a few jokes now and again” defence lawyer Sarah Ottinger told reporters in New Orleans,
“but taking that humour out of the office and into the courtroom is another story.
It’s a solemn event when the state decides that they want to kill one of their citizens,
and to be cute and flippant about it is clearly wrong.”
Ottinger was speaking after
prosecutors in Jefferson Parish (a suburb of New Orleans) had repeatedly conducted
murder trials while wearing neckties with swinging nooses on them. “I couldn’t believe
my eyes”, said Lawrence Jacobs. whose son was being tried on capital
murder charges.
“I walked into the courtroom, and there were two prosecutors wearing ghoulish ties,
one with a dangling noose, the other with an image of the Grim Reaper. That’s when
it really hit me. These guys are out to kill my son, and they’re making light of
it.”
Jacobs’ defence lawyers had to file a motion ‘to prohibit prosecutors from wearing
tasteless and improper garb in the courthouse’ before the prosecutors agreed to remove
them, but such behaviour is not uncommon in Louisiana. “Until recently, prosecution
lawyers used to celebrate lethal injections by giving each other plaques decorated
with hypodermic needles,” one defence lawyer confided, “and they still celebrate
death sentences with office parties.”
Commenting on such behaviour, Mr Jacobs observed
“these prosecution guys with their ties act like death is a joke, yet they’re the
ones calling my son a cold-blooded killer. And that’s what’s really crazy.”
(Chronicle Herald [Nova Scotia], 5/1/2003. Spotter: Wallace Brown)
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