If defending the Constitution means you can't look in the mirror, you're in the wrong profession.
Levi Aron was charged this week for abduction and death of Leiby Kletzky, an 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who disappeared while walking home from a Jewish day camp last week. Surveillance video showed the child asking a stranger, alleged to be Aron, for directions and then getting into his car. A city-wide search for the missing child ended when police found the boy’s body parts, leading to Aron’s arrest.
Now Gerard Marrone, one of the two lawyers defending Aron, has withdrawn from the representation. There is, in theory, nothing wrong with that. A lawyer can withdraw from any representation for good cause, as long as the withdrawal doesn’t harm the defendant. Marrone’s withdrawal, however, was done in such a way that it almost certainly harms the defendant, because the lawyer told the press why he was withdrawing.
“I have three little boys,” he told the Daily News,“You can’t look at your kids and then look at yourself in the mirror, knowing that a little boy, who’s close in age to my eldest son, was murdered so brutally.”
While Marrone didn’t exactly say that he couldn’t bring himself to defend a man who would do such a despicable and inhuman act, the implication was clear. After all, if Marrone believed his client was innocent of the murder, why would the crime’s brutality make it hard for him to look in the mirror? Marrone’s interview suggests that he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror while trying to keep such a monster out of prison or off of Death Row. And that means several things;
- He probably violated Aron’s confidence, a serious ethical breach with any client, and a potentially fatal breach in a capital murder case.
- He has made it infinitely harder for Aron to get a fair trial.
- He has not only suggested that his client is guilty, which a defense attorney may not do, but done it with the added flair of showing that this client is so reprehensible that it even turns the stomach of man who makes his living defending criminals of all sorts.
It also means that Marrone may be in the wrong profession.
I agree that if a lawyer is so personally repulsed by a client or what he believes a client has done that he feels that it will interfere with his ability to defend him, the lawyer not only can withdraw but must withdraw. This is a serious conflict of interest. But for the lawyer to explain his revulsion to the press, casting additional suspicion on the former client, is reckless and unethical. One of O.J. Simpson’s attorneys who withdrew from representing O.J. in the sensational murder trial later gave a TV interview in which he implied that Simpson’s guilt was the reason he couldn’t “in good conscience” participate in Simpson’s defense. That was unethical, but at least the trial was over. O.J. wasn’t harmed very much by his former lawyer helping to confirm what most people already believed. But Aron hasn’t been tried; he has a right to the presumption of innocence. Marrone has made that very near to impossible.
I say that Marrone may be in the wrong profession because his job is not to use his lawyerly wiles to send murderers back into society unpunished, but to make the government prove guilt legally, fairly and thoroughly, whether his defendant is an innocent and unjustly-framed saint, or a demonic serial killer. A defense attorney is defending our constitutional right to a fair trial, regardless of the specific defendant. Not only does this incident prove that Marrone was unable to defend his client, it shows that he was willing to undermine that right to salve his confused conscience.
Hat tip to the Legal Ethics Forum for the pointer.
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Note: (Added July 24, 2011) I knew I had seen this: in May, a Washington State defense attorney continued to represent a client after the client stabbed him in the neck with a pencil. Good for the lawyer (Thomas Cox, of Everett, Washington). A good criminal defense attorney cannot be a weenie.
Ethics Alarms 
Simple Justice was even less forgiving than you were. Marone knew what the accused crimes were before he agreed to represent his client. He can’t plead issues with them later: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2011/07/22/quitter.aspx.
Scott Greenberg also quotes someone defending the decision to pull out. I think it ties in nicely with the post about the public wanting Casey Anthony’s head. While we know that not everyone understands the law, ethics, and consequences, we hold lawyers to a higher standard.
It also appears to be Marrone, not Marone.
Thanks. Fixed.
Marrone still can justify leaving after taking the case—I assumed that he knew the details of the crime. I once had a lawyer tell me that she withdrew because after meeting her client she believed that he was the personification of evil, and couldn’t zealously represent him. OK. But she didn’t tell a newspaper reporter that!
So the decision can be defended…it’s the disclosure that really crosses the line.
A decision to withdrawl could be defended, but based on his unethical disclosures, not this decision: “The allegations were too horrific and it’s not something I wanted to be involved in.”
You have to make that call ahead of time.
Well, but you have to fix the problem. He CAN’T stay in once he realizes he can’t do the job.So leaving isn’t the breach…taking on a case that you can’t handle emotionally … that’s just a mistake, not an ethics violation.
I can go so far as an incomplete. Depending on his history and mental state, taking on the case may have been the ethics violation.
I understand your point.
But I think I am right in saying that it is extremely rare for any lawyer to be found to have violated the ethics rules for taking on a case. Even if you take on a case that is frivolous or that you are not qualified to handle, taking the case itself is not a violation. The only way I can see that taking on a case could be immediately unethical is if you are not authorized to practice law, if you get the case under false pretenses, or if you have an unwaivable conflict of interest that you intentionally don’t disclose. Even then, if you withdrew in time, it would be unlikely to lead the bar to say you had violated a Rule.
Here, the lawyer, qualified to do so, took on a legitimate case reasonably believing that he was capable of the representation. That’s not a violation. He changed his mind. THAT’S not a violation. He withdrew—he had to! (I wouldn’t want to have my life depend on a lawyer who couldn’t stand to look at me.) So where is the violation? Until he opened his mouth, there wasn’t one. Is he a weenie? Yes…and weenies shouldn’t be defense lawyer. But so far, that’s not an ethical matter.
The first paragraph is about enforcement of ethics rules, not actually ethical conduct. I find it extremely unethical to take on a case you are unqualified to handle.
The second paragraph has a few assumptions, but granting them, I agree. I just don’t see how someone could sanely believe they are willing to take on the case of a child dismemberer and then about face so quickly. Did he not love his kids last week?
Rule 1.1, Competence, requires a lawyer to be competent by the time he actually commences work on a case, but not when he takes it on initially. That makes sense.There is also, and you know this, a well-established human tendency to overestimate one’s ability to handle external factors until one actually has to do it. Thus soldiers who are brave going into battle become paralyzed with fear at the first gun shot, or confident medical students faint at the sight of blood. The lawyer may not have seen the evidence before taking the case—that’s common. Photos of a dismembered kid that resembled his own child? I could understand that unsettling someone.