Role-differentiated morality

A security guard was murdered and another guard seriously injured during the robbery of a store in a big city – it could be Manchester, Auckland, Calgary, Los Angeles, Johannesburg – anywhere in the common law world. The surviving guard identified two men, Logan and Hope, as the perpetrators. A week later, a man named Wilson was arrested for an unrelated crime, the murder of two police officers in the same city. Hope heard through jailhouse gossip about the arrest of Wilson and told his lawyer that he had committed the robbery with Wilson, not Logan. Hope’s lawyer communicated this information to Wilson’s lawyers, who went to see Wilson at the jail. Wilson confessed to his lawyers that he had committed the robbery with Hope and that he had in fact shot the security guards. Wilson declined to make a statement to the police, but the lawyers prepared an affidavit (a sworn statement) summarizing his statement, which they kept in a locked safe. Meanwhile, not knowing of Wilson’s admission of responsibility, prosecutors filed murder charges against Logan and Hope. Based on the testimony of the surviving guard, both were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. (Eyewitness identification is notoriously unreliable; the defense lawyer tried to establish this point, but the jury convicted the defendants anyway.) Wilson was convicted in a separate trial of murdering the two police officers and was sentenced to two life sentences without possibility of parole.

Imagine that you are one of the lawyers representing Wilson. What do you do with the knowledge that an innocent person will be spending the rest of his life in prison for a crime committed by your client? Perhaps the answer is to be found in a code of professional ethics, applicable to lawyers representing clients in a situation like this one. You consult the rules in your jurisdiction and read the following: