Thanks for clarifying. And I’m glad my post turned on the light without generating (I hope!) too much heat!

I was trying my hardest to say that your post turned the light switch on in my mind why I automatically agreed with the whole “telling a story” as opposed instantly picking up on the larger and more fundamental parts of defense attorney’s job.

What obviously did not communicate at all, but that I was trying to say, is that Crim Law (at least my experience in it) spends a lot of time discussing the death penalty, and the idea of telling a story to convince the jury not to hand down a death sentence. That was what I was referring to with the phrase “when there’s nothing to plead”. I should not have used a term-of-art in a throwaway phrase, sorry.
I know I found it very easy to make the leap from convincing a jury not to hand down the death penalty to a convicted appellant to telling the story of a defendant to achieve a fair outcome. That was my point: the intellectual exercises we did in crim law primed my view of the defense system, to focus on equity over exculpation.

I couldn’t have intended a more opposite meaning than what you read in my post, and I hope this comment (while probably as poorly written as the original post) explains that.

In my own post, among other mistakes, your comment seems to state that I am wrong about what my job is and it appears you believe both that my job is to present “the client’s story” and that I will do this until, inevitably, I lose.

Except, as I noted in my post, the law does not require that I “tell the client’s story.” The most it requires is that I show that the prosecution’s story is wrong. (I may not even have to do that much.)

Another error in the summary above is that I did not speak of one fundamental of our system, but of two; both are equally important. This is not a huge misrepresentation; just because I talk about two, doesn’t mean you have to say I did. But since you also misrepresented what I said about the point you did address, it makes me wonder how well you read the article.

Finally, I’ve handled more appeals than trials. (When I was a student, I handled the appellate work for a criminal law specialist and did the oral argument in the Fifth Appellate District Court in our state.) I find the comment you make about appellate opinions incomprehensible. What does “when there’s nothing left to plead” even mean?

The job of a defense attorney does not change just because it is a death case. (I’ve been involved in two so far; one while still a student, where I successfully performed my job of keeping out prejudicial evidence. Neither case involved “telling the client’s story.”)

Certainly, if (IF, not WHEN) you lose the guilt phase of the death case then your job switches to telling the client’s story in an effort to convince the jury, which has now convicted the client, not to hand down a death penalty. That story is not a story to counter the claim that he committed the crime, though. It is to explain why, even though the client committed the crime, he should not die.

There will be times in defending against guilt when “telling the client’s story” is the best way to show that the prosecution’s story is incorrect. That does not change “the job” of the attorney. The job of the attorney remains this: to force the prosecution to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the accused person is guilty as charged. If the attorney is successful at that, he will have performed his duties, even if he never tells the client’s story. Even IF (not, as you seem to indicate is inevitable, WHEN) he loses.