“Satan’s Minions” and “True Believers”: How Criminal Defense Attorneys Employ Quasi-Religious Rhetoric and What It Suggests about Lawyering Culture

Abstract

The notion of law as sacred, and lawyers as righteous saviors, may seem anachronistic in the current context of heavy caseloads and expedited processing in the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, language reflecting these ideals still permeates defense attorneys’ descriptions of their roles, their legal practice, and their relationships to their colleagues and adversaries. We examine this language – specifically, attorneys’ quasi-religious rhetoric – to better understand courtroom dynamics: how attorneys see themselves, their work, their colleagues, and their legal adversaries. In this analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 defense attorneys, we find that attorneys use of quasi-religious rhetoric manifests as a cultural practice that helps to establish and maintain professional identities, boundaries, and relationships. Our findings also suggest that young and novice public defenders are likely to express especially zealous views, which may compromise their efforts to collaborate within the adversarial system, as well as contribute to burnout.

Keywords:

• adversarial relationships
• public defender
• criminal law
• attorneys

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Ronald Wright for his helpful comments on an earlier draft and to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback. Our thanks also go to Elizabeth Marshall for help with the initial design of the “Weight of Public Service” study and Ashley Jackson for assistance with data collection. Last but not least, we thank the study participants who generously shared their opinions and experiences with us.

Notes

1 See Van Orden v. Perry (2005), in which the US Supreme Court ruled constitutional a monument to the Ten Commandments which still appears on the lawn of the Texas State Capitol building.

2 Human subjects research for "A Postconviction Mentality: Prosecutorial Assistance as a Pathway to Exoneration" was approved by the Rutgers University Institutional Review Board under protocol #16-428M.

3 This project was supported by Grant Number (2017-IJ-CX-0012), awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice.

4 Human subjects research for "The Weight of Public Service: Occupational Wellbeing among Public Defenders" was approved by the Rutgers University Institutional Review Board under protocol #17-454M.

5 This research was supported by the Rutgers University-Newark Chancellor’s Seed Grant Program

6 By “innocence organization attorney” we mean any attorney working on postconviction claims of innocence through a nonprofit innocence organization at the time of the interview. Many, but not all, also have experience working in public defender offices. While public defender respondents originate from both studies, all innocence organization attorneys originate from A Postconviction Mentality.

7 Deterding and Waters define index codes as “The inverse of line-by-line coding, index codes represent large chunks of text, enabling data reduction and retrieval as the analyst proceeds through constructing and documenting their argument. Setting the data up this way allows subsequent rounds of reading to be more focused and analytic coding to be more reliable” (2018, p. 19)

8 This subset does not represent the three public defenders who self-identified as religious.

9 Wayne

10 Darla

11 Ari

12 Brenda

13 Ruby

14 Ruby

15 Mark

16 Tiffany

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Grant Number (2017-IJ-CX-0012), awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice. This research was supported by the Rutgers University-Newark Chancellor’s Seed Grant Program.