By David Zapp
There once was a case where a defense lawyer was incredibly aggressive, and impressively aggressive. He filed every conceivable motion available to him and he would always ask permission to file a motion to exceed the page limit letting the judge know he had plenty to say. Every motion was then argued aggressively always with a hint of snarkiness and thinly veiled suggestions that the government was not playing by the rules. The lawyer in the case did not just ask for suppression of evidence. He asked for dismissal of the indictment, a rare motion that is hardly ever granted. In federal court if you have a problem with the indictment, the response is almost always the same: take it to trial.
In researching this defense lawyer I learned from the web that his firm’s mission was to be hard-nosed like that. They were litigators. They didn’t take repeat business. They were the equivalent of legal hit men. They liked to rumble. They never talked. They snarled.
But in the end after all the lawyer’s vitriol-laced motions were denied, their man pled guilty: Why? “Because you’re never better than your evidence.” Remember that.