Under the rubric of ethics, the legal profession itself is one of the most unique occupations in that it uses ethical concerns to define its entire contextual relationship. The modern legal system, which creates the roles of judge and jury, litigators and clients, and the idea that there is a certain moral or ethical responsibility to one's client, exists on the whole to promote and protect the society which established its role. "Thus, whatever may be said about the purposes of other professions, the purpose of the legal profession in bound up from the beginning of social morality."1
This paper will be concerned with one aspect of that social morality, and the question of what constitutes the ethical behavior in the legal profession that insists upon belief in a client's cause. In this sense, the paper will examine the role of the lawyer in defending a client that he or she knows is guilty of the crime under scrutiny. The case of Benjamin Francois Courvoisier will be used as the test situation for this inquiry, and the paper will begin with a background of the case itself. Following will be an examination of the role of a lawyer in the defense of a
1 David E. Schrader, Ethics and the Practice of Law, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988), vii.
guilty client. The paper will then analyze the issue of loyalty to a client, and the basic morality of law that insists that even the guilty should be given a proper defense.
In 1840 the London Times described Courvoisier as a perfect manservant, yet just four days after the initial announcement concluded that,
. . . the police, while still delving, 'have to a considerable extent, succeeded in fixing the guilt of the murder [of the Lord of the House] upon the part to whom suspicion pointed from the first. . . We mean, of course, the Swiss valet.2
The victim, Lord William Russel, was then seventy two years old, and an unlikely victim. The case against Courvoisier, ho...