When Good Lawyers Happen to Bad People
We are having a hurricane watch in our house, and all activity has halted
while we try to figure out whether the weather people know what they're talking
about and whether it is safe to use Fed Ex (which flies through Memphis) and
whether the contractor for our Long Island house ever fixed the front door that
doesn't close. The last time there was a hurricane we were in the house on Long
Island, and the police came and actually said the words "Seek higher
ground."
Which brings me to today's Duff-Perelman news: Ms. Duff has hired two new
lawyers, bringing the total of lawyers she has employed to 23, and the
22nd of them is the divorce lawyer who argued the custody case in
the divorce of the 21st lawyer, who was still on the case this
morning, but not for long. I know the 21st lawyer and have watched
horrified as he argued that anyone's 5-year-old deserves a $26,000 antique
desk, so I hope he has learned something.
Here is a serious thing for a moment: The world is full of women who can't
get their husbands to pay child support, and it won't be long before even the
ones on food stamps will be attacked by their ex-husbands' lawyers for being as
greedy as Patricia Duff.
Lawyers are fascinating things, aren't they? Thomas Puccio, once someone I
admired, took the case of that rapist-who-went-on-the-lam from Connecticut, and
tried to smear his accuser. And there's Marvyn Kornberg, who (fortunately) lost
for his client in the Louima case, but not before he had stood up in court and
accused Louima of being sodomized not by his client but by consensual sex in a
gay bar. Lawyers always fall back on the time-tested everyone-deserves-a-lawyer
thing, everyone-is-entitled-to-a-defense, but the truth is there's no excuse
for what these lawyers say in court-- for which they never ever even seem to
say they're sorry . And just because everyone deserves a lawyer doesn't mean
it has to be you. Incidentally, that's another side-effect of the dropping
crime rate: fewer criminals, and therefore fewer cases for criminal lawyers. As
it is, there's fierce competition among them for the celebrity criminals: You
could see it most clearly in the first days after Nicole Brown Simpson was
murdered, when virtually every good criminal lawyer was on Court TV auditioning
for the gig.
You're right about the police: The criteria for advancement in the
department should be changed now that the crime rate has dropped. But I had no
idea that you get bonus points for correctly challenging someone at
Scrabble.
I think it's interesting you sign off. I almost never do. It's one of the
liberating things about e-mail, that you don't quite have to say hello or
goodbye.
Today, among other things, I am grateful my name is not Floyd.
