Boston Bomber: A Defense Lawyer’s Empathy

Miriam Conrad, the lawyer for the Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, expressed the empathetic view of a criminal defense lawyer so well:

According to the Associated Press, in a 2006 interview with Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Conrad said she does not see her clients in one-dimensional terms. “From a personal standpoint, I would say that there are very few clients I have had who I didn’t like,” she said.
“If you scratch the surface, many have had difficult lives, and, as their lawyer, I sort of see them whole – not just as a person charged with a crime,” she said. “No one has ever stood up for them, and that is a very powerful, emotional thing,” she said.

This empathy is easily misunderstood by the public, it is easily mistaken for justification or excuse. And this empathy does not need to come at the expense of empathy with any victims, though it may seem that way to outsiders. It is simply the basic connection a lawyer makes with the humanity of someone who may have done something wrong, sometimes horribly wrong. Some people will refuse to see it as anything other than moral equivocation, to empathize with someone who has done something so wrong. And for those people, a longer argument would not help. But Miriam Conrad expressed the gritty and complicated emotional reality of practicing as a criminal defense lawyer, whether one’s client is a hated terrorist or an ordinary father of three, about to lose his job and go to jail over a misdemeanor conviction.