The Job of the Defense Attorney

I thought that this was a pretty interesting discussion topic in global. We talked about what the role of the defense attorney is in a criminal court case. Many would say that they have to get justice for their defendant. In a lot of cases, that would be true but isn't always true. In my opinion, I feel that OJ Simpson did commit the double murder AND is also the luckiest man alive. He had the right defense team and it worked out for him. His defense team, especially Johnnie Cochran, did their jobs great and filled their roles correctly. Their job is to get the jury to say that the defendant is not guilty and there are a lot of strategies of doing so. They don't even want to know if the defendant did what they were charged because it doesn't matter. Either way if he/she did it or not, they are getting paid to show the jury why the defendant is innocent. It isn't quite a straight forward thing in court, it is more of a competition between the prosecution and defense and the judges are the jury. Simply put, the team that can convince the jury that their side is correct or that the other side is flawed or incorrect. In the case for OJ Simpson, the defense knew that the cards were stacked against them and there was no way they could go against all this evidence collected straight up and therefore they had to attack the evidence and show the jury why it may be flawed. One way I could tell that the defense was a doing a good job of turning the case against the prosecution was when they exposed Mark Fuhrman and it was no longer about justice for Nicole or Ron but justice for the black community (which was a big part of the jury) in exposing dirty tactics and people in the LAPD. I honestly feel that the jury voted based off of emotion more than facts and evidence because this was a way for them to "police the police."