Readers and Filmmakers React to ‘Devil’s’ Criticism

What “Devil’s Advocate” offered was the affirmation of a popular sentiment: The legal system works, but it is not working well enough (“ Devil’s Advocate’: A Crime Against Our Legal System,” Counterpunch, Nov. 10). In fictional stories, as in real life, criminals are acquitted because of questionable technicalities that thwart prosecutors and police alike. Abuses of the law are not exclusive to criminal court. We are in a society where some klutz who spills coffee on her lap can assign blame on someone else, and reap six-figure settlements. Our courts allow it. This steps beyond proper use of the law; this is abuse of the law. Lawyers are irrefutably a component of such abuses.

But in criminal law, the moral weight of a crime seems to take a back seat to the judicial procedure, where lawyers play to win, no matter what. And win they will, if they can, often at the expense of morality.

There is a portion of the public who is fed up with the abuses of the legal system. We turn on the nightly news and see criminals getting away with murder. “Devil’s Advocate” is a film that suggests our society’s moral decay is being facilitated, in part, by sneaky lawyers who see to it that our legal system vindicates the guilty. The premise starts seeming a little less ridiculous after every questionable court judgment is featured in the news, day after day.

“Devil’s Advocate” didn’t offer suggestions for a better legal system simply because that is not what the story is about. It is the story of an individual, a lawyer, and the choices he had to make to maintain to his personal code of what’s right and what’s wrong. The legal system was the story vehicle--a backdrop.

Scriptwriters and other media writers reach an audience by using a common perception. Today in America, one common perception is that some lawyers are abusing the legal system. And though the legal system is designed to serve the public, many have questioned its effectiveness.

DANIEL J. DEGNAN

Los Angeles

*

Roger Lowenstein relates Sir William Blackstone’s opinion that it’s better that 10 guilty persons escape rather than one innocent suffer. How about 100 escaping, or is that over the quota? How about 1,000? Would that be better? If not, why not? Lowenstein chooses to ignore the fact that when dangerous people are free to roam in society, they hurt people.

ERIC RILEY

Long Beach

*

Roger Lowenstein accuses the makers of “Devil’s Advocate” of immoral filmmaking, an accusation that would be obscene if it were not absurd. The film expressly shows that lawyers, like their fellow citizens, make hard moral decisions, even risking their careers for their beliefs.

Let us not falsely accuse a fine, thought-provoking and entertaining film of bringing the law into public disrepute, which it clearly does not, nor, I suspect, ever intended to.

CHRISTOPHER COLEMAN

Tarzana

*

With all due respect to all honest lawyers, “Devil’s Advocate” brings to light what is happening currently to the “justice” industry. Only a naive person will fail to notice this trend.

As Roger Lowenstein mentioned in his Counterpunch, we have a great justice system compared to the rest of our world. Some attorneys abuse it to the extreme, and some choose not to do so. This movie is simply about the ones who abuse it.

SAKO KALBAK

Camarillo