Originally posted by: smack Down
Think of it the other way with out attorney client privilege the person would still be in jail.
I think this is the most insightful post.
Remember that the justice in this situation rests on the actual killer cnfessing/co-operating at all.
The law of unintended consequences kicks in here, when you 'fix' it by breaking the confidentiality - then, the actual killer wouldn't confess at all to his lawyers.
My own reaction, like probably most readers, was fury at the injustice, and the 'there's got to be a way' feeling.
I'm not going to rule out that there is a way, but I've pulled way back from that.
The blame (after the obvious blame on the killer for the crime itself) lies in the imperfection of investigations for finding the real killer, and then on the imperfections of the justice system for convicting the wrong man on what was obviously insufficient evidence, not obviously as in 'obvious to the jurors', but obvious in the deductive sense of 'since he was innocent, the evidence must have fallen short of actual proof'.
I have come to see the attorneys as victimized themselves by the killer, forced to carry this terrible burden of knowing and being unable to free the innocent man for those years.
Unfortunately, I don't know a solution to this. Any fix seems to cause more harm than good. For example, ay special treatment for 'special communications' by lawyers caught up in a bind like this lends itself to abuse - every defendant would want their lawyer looking for ways to game the system. If the system relied on trust it could be abused, and if it didn't, it'd violate the confidentiality and people wouldn't tell their lawyers at all.
A horror like this is one reason we all need to take improvements and reforms to the justice system as a priority - esoteric issues can become nightmares for people.
When people react to issues with those systems with simplistic 'who cares about those criminals' apathy, they're part of the problem.
Unfortunately, not only are there bastards out there like the murderer who let someone stay in jail, but I bet many here would be hard-pressed, if facing a long jail term for a crime they committed, to give up a 'free pass' given to them by the wrong person being convicted and go serve the decades to free the innocent person, even if they felt badly; we just have some imperfections in the system with terrible consequences for people.
This is one reason why I react with anger when I see uninformed, knee-jerk comments from people complaining about how the system 'gives more rights to the criminal than the victim'. Those rights would be awfully important if they kept you from being convicted for a crime you didn't commit. While I also may have some more concerns about the actual criminals than some do - for example, I'm a fan of the anti-prison rape group
SPR (Stop Prisoner Rape), much of the issue is protecting innocents.