"In Pakistan, or U.S., Lawyers Make a Stand," Editorial by Dean Getches

Dean David Getches' editorial in today's Rocky Mountain News was titled "In Pakistan, or U.S., lawyers make a stand."

What a strange sight: demonstrators in dark suits and ties being clubbed by police. Hundreds of lawyers have been rounded up and held in jails to put down a revolt against Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The general is supposedly a friend of the United States and President Bush just this week reiterated his commitment to keep sending billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan. So, are these lawyers troublemakers who deserve beatings and incarceration?

The Pakistani lawyers took to the streets after the president suspended the constitution, dissolved the supreme court and four provincial high courts, and shut down privately owned television news channels. This followed the firing of the nation’s chief justice. To lawyers here in the United States it is not surprising that their counterparts in Pakistan would stand up for the rule of law. That’s what lawyers do.

The Colorado attorney’s oath swears support for the U.S. Constitution and the state constitution. It also requires that one not reject “the cause of the defenseless or oppressed” for personal reasons.

Keeping the oath can result in snide lawyer jokes that associate the attorney’s work with the deeds of sometimes unsavory clients. How can lawyers who are themselves virtuous and law-abiding stand in court in their nice suits next to Nazi skinheads and tattooed drug peddlers?

Well, they are holding the government accountable to the Constitution. And, in the end, the same rules they enforce against the government in cases involving “the least among us” will apply when the rights being asserted are free speech by a newspaper reporter or freedom against unreasonable search of a good neighbor’s home — or our own home.

Of course, some lawyers go too far. And they are disciplined severely. When Mike Nifong, in prosecuting the Duke lacrosse players for rape, withheld exculpatory DNA evidence he departed from the rule of law and he was disciplined — fired, disbarred, prosecuted. Lawyers are held to a high standard for anything they do within the judicial system.

The popular misconceptions of lawyers come not from the occasional ethical lapses of lawyers, which are pursued zealously by the profession itself. Rather they come from a failure to understand the lawyer’s commitment to the rule of law. When several lawyers at fancy law firms volunteered their time to represent suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo they were severely criticized. A deputy assistant secretary of Defense even called on corporate clients to boycott the law firms, and questioned the motives of the lawyers doing the apparent pro bono work who, he said, must be “receiving monies from who knows where.”

Understanding that those lawyers are really on the right side of the war on terrorism requires understanding that they are fighting for the constitutional principles that terrorists would destroy. If we are intimidated into suspending our constitutional protections of due process, right to counsel, and habeas corpus we concede defeat in the war on terrorism.

Shakespeare understood. In Henry VI, Part 2, one of his comedic characters was plotting a rather silly overthrow. But he knew what stood in the way, and said: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Then as now, the lawyers were the first line of defense of law and order.

What is at stake in Pakistan is of grave proportions. And the outcome matters to the security of the United States and the world. The January elections in Pakistan have been delayed to keep the general in power. The rule of law is being suspended in a country that is a nuclear power, that harbors the Taliban who are resurgent in Afghanistan, that likely is the hiding place of Osama bin Laden, and that is presumed to be our ally in the war on terrorism.

The lawyers resisting Musharraf’s edict, like other lawyers, know that freedom and democracy can survive only under a rule of law, not of men. And they know that without constitutional framework, government in Pakistan could spiral into dangerous instability and chaos. And with it could go the safety of much of the world.