The Role of the Defense Lawyer

Places like the Old Bailey, while they certainly were the setting of many injustices, at least once looked like buildings in which one might aspire to justice; to something higher. Today the architecture of most modern courtrooms and courthouses offers a different message written unmistakably in design and details: these now are places in which government functionaries with dimmed vision work only to "process" people through an administrative course, dehumanizing efficiency their primary goal. The architecture befits the practice within. While the defence bar did not sponsor the changes in pretrial and trial practice that have demoted advocacy and deflated the spirit of liberty itself in favor or promoting efficiency of the machinery that conveys the poor from street to prison or jail, we have allowed ourselves to be coopted by the bureaucracy in its pursuit of this different goal. Sheathed in the numbing architecture of bureaucratic functionality, the entire system within now often looks as if designed by industrial engineers, not by lawyers with a hope of justice in mind and heart. Ed Johnston here raises a thoughtful voice to call us all to account for what we have surrendered or allowed to be stripped away, as a profession and as a people. The tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Human Touch is intended, for Ed Johnston has shone an humanitarian light on our loss.

-- Dean Strang, Loyola University Chi