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THE DARK SIDE: Don’t trust your soul to no union lawyer

By: David Ziemer, [email protected]//August 2, 2011//

THE DARK SIDE: Don’t trust your soul to no union lawyer

By: David Ziemer, [email protected]//August 2, 2011//

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David Ziemer

When I was a child, a song by Vickie Lawrence reached number one on the charts, about an innocent man hung for murder, entitled “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” The song warned, “Don’t trust your soul to no backwoods Southern lawyer.”

Someday, somebody should write a sequel with the lyrics, “Don’t trust your soul to no two-faced union lawyer.”

Before you accuse me of union-bashing, let me assure you that this isn’t an anti-union column. On the contrary, I merely want to demonstrate the inherent conflict of interest in a practice that most people reflexively consider a good one – unions providing counsel for their members who are accused of crimes.

In a garden-variety case, I’m sure this poses no problems. But the potential for abuse is there, as you will see from the story I’m about to tell you.

I got a call one day, from some friends of a teacher who had been arrested for secretly videotaping his third-graders while they were changing clothes. I went down to the jail to see him and ask if he wanted to retain me. But he said the union would take good care of him, give him an attorney and pay the tab. I went on my way, but followed the case.

These days, there are criminal statutes that explicitly prohibit what the defendant did, such as sec. 942.08 and 942.09. But those statutes weren’t on the books back when this happened. The reality was that there was nothing in the criminal code to prohibit what he did. But rather than let him go, the district attorney charged him with child enticement.

Needless to say, he was not guilty of child enticement, unless one is willing to interpret that statute far beyond what it actually contemplates. This is not to say that the appellate courts wouldn’t have stretched the definition that far if presented with the case, especially when the defendant had done something so abhorrent, but there was no other law against it.

But they never got the chance to consider the scope of the statute. His attorney never moved to dismiss the complaint, never demanded a jury trial and never appealed either the sufficiency of the complaint or the sufficiency of the evidence.

I believed then, and I still believe, that the defense strategy was dictated not by the best interests of his client, but by the best interests of the union.

The last thing the union would have wanted is to have all the newspapers and television stations going on about how a third-grade teacher surreptitiously recorded his students while they changed clothes, yet the court dismissed the charges – not because he didn’t do what was alleged, but because there was no law against it. What the union wanted, I am sure, was that this case quietly disappear from the public’s radar.

So, rather than zealously defend his client and cause a public uproar that someone might use to criticize teachers generally, I believe the attorney failed to even raise the best defense available to him.

Like I said, I’m not here to bash the unions. I write this for the benefit of union members and attorneys alike. Some day, you may meet a prospective client, who is disposed not to hire you, because he thinks his union-paid attorney will take good care of him.

I encourage you to share my little tale with that prospective client. If he takes it to heart, he will get an attorney who actually represents his interests. And you will get a paying client.

David Ziemer can be reached at [email protected].

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