Lawyers: Nobody likes lawyers, more or less. One of my observations is that lawyers sometimes lose because they insult the jury's intelligence. There was a case of a little girl (teenager, I forget her name) who killed her boyfriend, who she was living with, by stabbing him in the back repeatedly with a knife. He had abused her, it seems. On the witness stand, she told (in tears) how he had torn up her teddy bear. Wrong! She had obviously been coached to be as pathetic and helpless as possible (and she wore clothes and hairdo which made her look as young as possible). I don't think a jury is going to buy that. The William Kennedy Smith rape trial should never have been held. Guilty or not, there was no case. But, he was tried because he was a Kennedy, the public demanded it, reverse discrimination. In her summation, the prosecutor asked the jury how they could possibly believe that Smith would have consensual sex just outside his mother's window. The case was already pathetically lost, but that was a mistake. The defence lawyer was alert enough to ask the jury how they could possibly believe that Smith could get away with rape just outside his mother's window. In O.J. Simpson's murder trial, O.J.'s glove (which didn't fit his hand, for whatever reason) was a blunder, whether it was really his glove or not. The prosecution should have forgotten about the glove, because it insulted the jury's intelligence.

Addendum:

Plea bargaining (making a deal) gets a little bad press. After thinking about it for a while, I finally realized why I am in favor of such deals. I object to so many guilty criminals pleading "not guilty." It is an insult to my sense of right and wrong. I would wish that more criminals would own up to their mistake and plead guilty. And offering them a lesser sentence is the incentive for this guilty plea. Certainly they have a right to plead "not guilty," and face a trial. But we need to give them the option of pleading guilty.

A friend of mine saw a bike leaning against a building. He was concerned that someone might steal the bike, so he moved it inside the building. He was charged with stealing the bike. Upon his lawyer's advice, he pled guilty. Now he has a felony conviction on his record. It would seem that he had a really stupid lawyer. There was never any intent to steal.