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Happy Days!
We don’t know what we’d do here at QuizLaw if we didn’t get our weekly fix of crazy from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He’s like the legal world’s Paris Hilton - kind of useless, but immensely entertaining. And this week, he doesn’t let us down, offering the equivalent of Paris Hilton urinating in a cab in the form of statements he made in a Supreme Court argument yesterday.
The case in question was United States v. Gonzales-Lopez, and if you’re unfamiliar with the details of the case, the central question involves the right of a paying defendant to be represented by his or her lawyer of choice. The question itself is important because many a defendant prefers to use family members or cheap Johnny Cochran’s who offer up outlandish, oftentimes creative, arguments to defend their clients. The problem, of course, is when defendants use their own money to choose a thoroughly incompetent lawyer, risking the possibility of a retrial (at taxpayer’s expense) for inadequate counsel, i.e., the My Cousin Vinny predicament.
During oral arguments, newly appointed Cheif Justice Roberts seemed to suggest the right of a defendant to procure his or her first choice was not a constitutional right, remarking, “it’s not as if he asks for a Rolls Royce and gets a Yugo or something.”
Later on, however, Scalia offered up the money quote of the day, seemingly rebutting Roberts’ suggestion and siding with a defendant’s constitutional right to hire the lawyer of his/her choice: “I don’t want a ‘competent’ lawyer. I want a lawyer to get me off. I want a lawyer to invent the Twinkie defense. I want to win.”
