This doesn't strike me as all that fundamentally different from the US situation. If I understand you correctly, in the UK, the "line" that you can't cross comes when you know for an absolute fact that the person is guilty. When you get that knowledge, you take actions (withdrawing from the case) that prevent that knowledge from getting into court. You say that you _must_ hand back your brief - you're not allowed to just march up to the judge and volunteer to be a prosecution witness, right? So the person who next takes the case is just _mostly_ sure that the client is guilty, based on the fact that another lawyer released the case. They're still allowed to provide a defense. So the lawyer who withdrew from the case is allowing the lawyer who takes the case to mislead the court. In the end, the client can get a vigorous defense even though a lawyer knows he's guilty. It appears that the American version is very similar, but it just draws the line in a different place - from what (admittedly little) I know, it draws the line at _speaking_, or enabling the client to speak, words that are absolutely known to be a lie. The client can still get a vigorous defense even though a lawyer knows he's guilty. And I think that this all of this a good thing - it shouldn't be possible to convict a man without sufficient evidence, and a lawyer should not be required to be an accomplice in helping his client to lie. My point is that I don't see that the UK ethical line is fundamentally different from the US line; it lands in a different place, but both serve the same purposes. (Edited to add: And - again, as I understand it - the US defense lawyer doesn't have to prove that his client is innocent, he has to demonstrate that he _hasn't been proven guilty_. Perhaps that's part of the reason for that positioning of the ethical line. He's not misleading the court, because the court wants to know if the client has been proven guilty, not merely whether the client is guilty. If the lawyer for a known-guilty client demonstrates that the evidence is insufficient, he is demonstrating the truth, not a lie. Saying that, to go back to my example, several other people could have stolen the car, is not saying that they stole the car, or that the client didn't steal the car. It's saying that there's insufficient proof that the client stole the car.) ChickenFreak
England and Wales. Scotland has a different legal system. With regards to the plea bargaining, I was referring to my understanding of the US system. One of my contemporaries practised at the New York bar (aside - I've been Called to the Bar of England and Wales. It's one reason why I'm called a barrister. It's in part to denote the split in the profession between barristers and solicitors. Why does the US have a bar when there's not a split profession?) for a (very short) while and filled me in in what went on with plea bargains. I was going on his explanation, which sounds like it was very wrong.
