Questions of Ethics

...At the same time, analyses of difficult questions too often stay on the surface, without delving deeply into all of the ethical pros and cons As in an introductory college course, topics are raised, then dropped so that the professor can move on Consequently, a reader may close this volume doubly pleased—first, because Gorovitz is offering classes on medical ethics to future doctors, second, because he or she does not have to sit through them...

...Each year Dershowitz' students reach different conclusions Their professor often does not escape criticism Dershowitz has made a reputation defending unpopular clients One of his most notorious was Bernard Bergman, the nursing home operator who m 1975 was for many the personification of evil Dershowitz argues that the image was unfair, that Bergman had been tried by the press and ambitious politicians, who were whipping up public sentiment against him In contrast to the accusations made in the newspapers, Bergman was actually charged with only two minor offenses, and the four-month sentence he received in Federal court, which caused a huge uproar of protest, was handed down by Judge Marvm Frankel, one of the sanest and most scholarly men on the bench While Dershowitz failed to prevent the state court from imposing an additional sentence on Bergman, his depiction of a man trying to defend himself against lynch-mob hysteria is convincing Dershowitz is not always so persuasive In the "Prince of the City" case his client was Edmund Rosner, a shady defense lawyer who had been entrapped by the corrupt cop-turned-informer Bob Leuci TheU S Attorney's Office considered Rosner its "public enemy number one" because he had made a career of keeping heroin dealers out of jail by producing highly suspect alibi witnesses for them There is no question that the Federal prosecutors were out to get him, and get him they did, by dubious means Dershowitz is outraged by their methods He scornfully declares that some government lawyers "are prepared to close their eyes to perjury, to distort the truth, and to engage in cover-ups—all in the name of defending society from the obviously guilty " I am not sure these accusations are quite as terrible as Dershowitz wishes them to sound The legal system might require a degree of flexibility so that justice can be served, there is a difference between bending the law and breaking it On the other hand, Justice Holmes, as Dershowitz pointedly reminds us, said "It is a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble role...

...His associate, Justice Brandeis, agreed Perhaps there are no satisfactory answers in the Rosner case, as there may be none in many of the other cases included in The Best Defense where public safety is set against civil liberties Bringing such ethical conundrums to general attention could be the book's greatest virtue SAMUEL GOROVITZ' Doctors' Dilemmas Moral Con-flictandMedicalCare(Macmil\an,225pp ,$14 95)is similar to The Best Defense in many ways It is concerned with professional ethics, and it, too, leaves a reader with more questions than answers Some of the topics treated are agonizingly familiar—abortion, euthanasia, in vitro fertilization?and some of the situations discussed are brain-teasingly problematic A woman applied for impregnation at an artificial insemination clinic During the course of her psychiatric interview it was revealed that 1) she wasn't married, and 2) she was a lesbian She explained she had a stable relationship with another woman, and that they had decided they would like to have a child Since the normal procedure represented a violation of her principles, she came to the clinic When Gorovitz, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland, presents this case to his classes, he generates the same kind of heated discussion Dershowitz provokes with his JDL case Gorovitz himself is obviously a decent, thoughtful, dedicated man with a serious interest in improving the ethical side of medical education His book is a call for reform Students, he says, "should be sensitized to the reality and importance of ethical issues as early as possible in their medical training '' Instruction should be continued intermittently throughout their school years, and intensive study be required just before they go on to their residencies "The point is not to provide information, but to cultivate habits of mind and attitude Only if the students' exposure to ethical reflection is a continuing presence in their consciousness will this result be achieved " The outcome, Gorovitz predicts, would be better, more sensitive physicians and improved doctor-patient relations The message of Doctors' Dilemmas seems unexceptionable The trouble is that it is not packaged very well Gorovitz tends toward windiness, exhibiting the philosopher's penchant for explaining everything, even subjects ordinary people take for granted Is a discussion of why illness is bad really necessary...

...How much can the law be bent to convict the obviously guilty...

...Writers & Writing QUESTIONS OF ETHICS BY BARRY GEWEN Under our adversary system of criminal justice, defense attorneys are expected to do everything legally within their power to win their clients' acquittal Laymen, for the most part, understand this and accept it What is hard for them to accept are those occasions when an attorney appears to have perpetrated a miscarriage of justice by keeping a client out of jail through clever courtroom tactics or some legal technicality At such times, professional duties and the public interest seem to clash irreconcilably John Hinckley's lawyers are winning little kudos for a job well done The Best Defense (Random House, 426 pp , $16 95), by Harvard law professor Alan M Dershowitz, tackles this problem head-on It is in part a sometime defense attorney's brief for defense attorneys, who are described as "the last bastion of liberty—the final barrier between an overreaching government and its citizens " Dershowitz succinctly explains his rationale "One of the surest ways of undercutting the independence of defense attorneys is to question the propriety of their representing the guilty Those who argue that defense attorneys should limit their representation to the innocent, or indeed to any specific group or category, open the door to a system where the government decides who is, and who is not, entitled to a defense " Although Dershowitz' arguments are not new, he is bolder than most The vast majority of defendants, he declares, are guilty of the crimes for which they are on trial Prosecutors, he says, are dishonest, judges twist the law, the police commonly perjure themselves on the witness stand Last March, a New York Times story reported that Dershowitz "takes pride" in defending people he knows have committed murder, and quoted some of his forthcoming book's more outlandish statements, including the following " I do not apologize for or feel guilty about helping to let a murderer go free, even though I realize that someday one of my clients may go out and kill again " Those who saw that article may be forgiven if they came away believing that Dershowitz is a legal flibbertigibbet who deserves to be shipped off to a desert island along with all of the murderers, rapists and drug dealers he and others of his breed have helped go free The Best Defense is not outlandish, and Dershowitz is no flibbertigibbet His more extreme remarks are packed into a rather tendentious Introduction calculated, one suspects, to attract the attention of readers The bulk of the book is devoted to describing the author's noteworthiest cases, detailing the exploits of a brilliant and imaginative defense attorney These sections are immensely readable, thought-provoking, often troubling Some recount exciting courtroom dramas, others explore legal frontiers—as a full-time professor, Dershowitz is free to choose the cases he wants, those where a large principle is at stake or an interesting point of criminal law is at issue One chapter movingly relates his battle on behalf of Soviet dissidents Whatever his beliefs about the proper role of defense attorneys, Dershowitz himself appears to be on the side of the angels in almost all of the cases he mentions, defending clients who have been unfairly railroaded by the authorities (though, admittedly, we have only his word for this) In one instance, in explicit contradiction ot his claim to feeling no remorse at his courtroom successes, he broods at length over helping a client beat a murder rap That case, beautifully narrated, is among the most gripping in the book It involves the death ot a girl as the result ot a terrorist bomb explosion in a New 'lork Citv office Three young members ot the Jewish Defense League were charged with the mine, and Dershowitz, lor a \anet> ot reasons found himself defending one of them His client, he soon discovered, was a police informer—a "kosher canary" the cops called him—whose testimony was crucial to the prosecution The boy, who had actually manufactured the bomb that killed the victim, did not wish to take the stand against his friends He told Dershowitz the police had forced him to become an informer by threatening his life and, what is more, he had tapes to prove it How Dershowitz made use of those tapes is right out of the pages of a Perry Mason mystery, and as his client and the two codefendants walked out of the courtroom free men, the judge launched into a tirade against those who frustrate the administration of justice Dershowitz was devastated "I sat in court for a full hour after everyone else had left I wanted no part of the victory celebration " Ever since, he has taught the case in his criminal law class at Harvard because of the perplexing issues involved How far should the police go in obtaining evidence...

...They were under enormous pressure from the Nixon Administration to curb the JDL, which was damaging U S -Soviet relations, and the boy's information did, in fact, save lives) What rights do informers have...