Famed Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr., known for his successful legal representation of such celebrities as O.J. Simpson and Sean "Puffy" Combs, hosted yesterday's panel discussion entitled "Spinning with the Media: The Interface of Journalism, Law and Ethics."
A pivotal point in yesterday's heated ethical debate centered on the assumption of innocence and guilt and the inherent one-sidedness of the defense lawyer's role as "advocate."
Although panelist Tom Holliday, former legal counsel for Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss, said that he always asks his clients to divulge their actual innocence or guilt, Cochran answered the question a bit differently in a later interview with The Dartmouth.
"I ask them to tell me the facts," he said, later adding the ambiguous qualification, "with those questions I'll know."
Cochran, however, may never have to deal with this issue again.
Despite his past success in defense cases involving high-profile clients, he said that he does not plan to take on any more criminal cases. Instead, he will direct his career toward civil law.
Although Cochran served as Assistant District Attorney for Los Angeles County in his young adulthood, he believes that, at this point in his life, defense offers him a wider range of opportunities to pursue his main professional goal: the promulgation of social change.
Indeed, inundated with case offers, Cochran said he must be selective when deciding whether or not to take on a new case, and that, before committing himself to any one, Cochran asks himself, "Is this a case where I can try to make a difference in society?"
Currently, Cochran is attempting to use the Taylor case -- involving an 11-year-old Florida boy who was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly killing a younger female playmate -- to forensically combat the new mandatory minimum sentencing laws that he sees as "draconian."
According to Cochran, the unique opportunity to "make a difference" was what attracted him to law in the first place. Despite his mother's fervent desire for him to study medicine, childhood exposure to the famed Brown v. Board of Education case affected his life irrevocably.
"From that moment on, that's what I wanted to do," he said.
Cochran's passion for polemics glimmered through in yesterday's panel, involving five prominent representatives of the legal and journalistic professions, including Dartmouth graduate Stacy Phillips '80, a California divorce lawyer.
Integral to the discussion of the ethics of trial publicity was the inherent ideological discrepancy between the first and seventh amendments, the rights to free speech and a fair trial, respectively.
According to the panelists, contemporary legal cases are often tried not only in the courtroom but also in the headlines, making the selection of impartial jurors increasingly difficult.
And, according to Cochran, "if you don't have a fair jury, the trial is over."
With the conspicuous news magazines labeling a case "the trial of the century" and talking heads on major news networks doling out nightly judicial commentary before the trial even begins, media image has become a key extra-legal component to the modern judicial defense system.
Indeed, as Cochran pointed out, the media may sometimes blow a case out of proportion.
"Trials of the century are very interesting because they happen every couple of years," he noted.
Other ethical issues discussed included lawyer-client confidentiality and its counterpart in the journalistic world -- the revelation of sources -- as well as "conflicts of interest" and the "off-the-record" phenomenon.
The forceful eloquence and witty ethical gymnastics with which Cochran mediated caused panelist Richard Leiby, an editor for the Washington Post, to declare at one point in the discussion, "this seat has gotten rather hot."
Leiby sat in the hot seat yesterday courtesy of the Ethics Institute and the family of Stacy Phillips, who cosponsored the event.
