Can anybody really know what is going inside the heads of criminal lawyers? I mean, yes, we can pick bits of their intelligence during courtroom trials and through the legal documents that they draft. But considering the chances that defense lawyers can acquit obviously guilty criminals through small technicalities—simple folks like me all over the world must be forever in awe of their cunning minds.

It is not only with defense lawyers. Every time the lawyers in the prosecution prove the accused guilty of his or her crime, they also prove that they have smarter ways to counter whatever tricks they have on their sleeves. When you think of it, the whole engagement looks and feels like a game—a game of who is the smartest, the best. Thing is, this kind of game has been present in all kinds of industry since time immemorial. What is unique in this game among criminal lawyers is the challenge of who can twist the law the most and can effectively get away with it. As mentioned earlier, this is a recurring (and accepted) practice among the defense lawyers. Something that is not supposed to be.

Unfortunately, it has become a norm. And it is okay. As long as they are cunning enough to bend the law in their favor. This practice exist in every court in every country in the world. The goal of a criminal lawyer boils to one thing: winning the case. Whatever method he or she may use in between is confidential, known only to them or to their firm.

I’m always asking this to myself. Are the criminal lawyers, especially defense lawyers, still bothered by their conscience? If so, is that the reason why they can’t sleep at night? This is just a speculation, but is this the reason for some lawyers’ insomnia? Paranoia? Mood swings? Perhaps because this is the path they choose, they opt to shrug this need for moral responsibility. They shrug it off, but it is still there, of course, eating the back of their minds.

As I said, these are just speculations. I am just letting the romantic in me get the best of this musing. We’ll never know. Maybe most of them are robot-like personalities with hearts of steel. But maybe this is also true in some criminal lawyers. Again, we will never know. We can only speculate. We can only try to put feelings in the otherwise stern, confident faces we see in court trials and television interviews. Nevertheless, this is a clever bunch, these criminal lawyers. The rest of the world is better off with them than without them. Whatever their idiosyncrasies are, we still need them to tip the balance of what we believe is justice.

* Criminal lawyers in India