Sunday, December 16, 2007
Plague of the lawyers
What is it with lawyers nowadays? They seem to be skipping town one too many times with somebody else's money, obviously prepared to live elsewhere for the rest of their lives. When you think about it, making a home elsewhere outside of this tiny island of ours is not necessarily a bad proposition. With at LEAST a couple of hundred big ones in their bank accounts - they are set for life, especially in countries where the prices of houses and cars are more 'sane'. Of course, they will have the 'noose' hanging over their heads for the rest of their lives, and they can thenceforth only see Changi Airport's T3 (what a marvellous T3 it is!) from the inside only when and if they are passing through. Otherwise, there is nothing to miss in Singapore - not the taxi services, not the bus services, not even the no-nonsense government.
But that's not the only thing about lawyers nowadays. They are also bad for health. It appears that defendants, once they have engaged a lawyer, begin to report a thousand and one ailments stretching back to when they were one year old. Not only that, some of these defendants' psychiatrists, psychologists and anyone in between, will swear by their qualifications that these poor defendants have some kind of psychosis that makes whatever they may have been accused of doing excusable and therefore pardonable.
Lawyers are so good at uncovering such ailments that they put all trained doctors to shame. For example, there is that 68 year-old taxi driver who was discovered to have been suffering from nose cancer, diabetes, chronic heart problems and awaiting open-heart surgery. And these amazing discoveries were made AFTER the taxi driver engaged a lawyer to defend him. The reader who pointed this out in a letter to Today asked a pertinent question: "If he was so sick, how come he was still driving a taxi?" But that's not the only example. Mdm Vialli's alleged exorcism problems are almost all attributed to a deterioration of the body. The only effect it had on the spirit was to make it stronger so that she could fight for the pot of cash that both lawyer and client hope to find at the end of the tunnel.
I often wonder if lawyers have no sense of shame in bringing to the attention of the learned bench such blatant fiction in order to get their clients off the hook. I could have become a lawyer except my mother told me a long long time ago that she didn't like lawyers because they have to stoop so low in order to perform their jobs. Up until recently, I still regretted not having become a lawyer, but those thoughts are getting dimmer and dimmer...
p.s. which is not to say that ALL lawyers are crooks. There are many decent ones, but the pot is easily tainted with just a couple of bad ones. Ironically, the person I admire the most is a lawyer by the name of Abraham Lincoln. He was an honest bloke.
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1 comment :
it is too costly to expect justice in court. the regidity, the cumbersomeness and sometimes costly process( eg. how many can afford experts( self interest) to strengthen one's case?) are deterrence to seeking justice. at the end of the day, most will just suffer the injustices. this is true for all social classes( rich may not want their skeletons in the closet uncovered) but the problem more be more acute for the poor and middle class( can't afford it etc).
basically, it is plagued by money. too much of it for the lawyers and too little of it to pay for justice.
and the in-between process, simply dirty( as you have described it and that's only the tip of the iceberg) because...it( the nonsense) is tolerated by the supremes probably for political convenience.
so the entire legal system needs to be reformed. that's my take.
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