It’s ‘un-American’ to harass defense attorneys for doing their jobs | Op-Ed

Two weeks ago, I served as the appointed defense attorney in the criminal trial of Mr. Devon Dunham, indicted for the murder of Ernest Martin Stevens in Jasper County. In their verdict of “Not Guilty,” the jury — consisting of seven Black jurors and five white jurors — found that the prosecution had failed to meet their burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intended to harm Mr. Stevens when he shot his pistol toward Mr. Stevens’ moving vehicle. Because Mr. Dunham was not charged with any other offenses, and the Solicitor’s Office did not directly indict Dunham for any other or lesser offense, the jury could not consider and give a verdict on any other possible offenses.

Mr. Dunham was later released.

Then, the telephone calls and e-mails to my office began. One called me a “race traitor,” since Mr. Dunham was Black and Mr. Stevens was white. One message stated that I “don’t deserve to live.” One expressed a hope that someone would kill my father. My family wants me to report this harassment to law enforcement. However, I believe that the best protection for myself, my family and any other defense attorney threatened for doing their job is to try to educate our community on why we defense attorneys do this job.

When my children were younger, they asked me how I could defend bad people like they saw on TV. I told them something like, “I help make sure that the police, the prosecution and the jury all do their jobs fairly so no one is convicted of a crime when the law says they shouldn’t be.” The fact is, the right to a defense counsel and the right to “due process” to ensure fair trials was so important to our founding fathers that they enshrined them in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, right along with our revered rights to free speech and to bear arms.

The presumption of innocence that must be rebutted by proof beyond reasonable doubt to secure a criminal conviction is the core principle for “fair trials” in our country. It is the golden thread connecting all American and British criminal courts to each other. It has never been expressed better or more simply than by the 18th century English jurist, William Blackstone, who stated that, “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape [punishment] than that one innocent suffer.”

It does not matter whether Devon Dunham was one of the “ten guilty men” who escaped punishment or if he was the “one innocent.” The jury’s verdict in Mr. Dunham’s trial does not mean that I did anything wrong in zealously representing him or that the jury did anything wrong in finding him “Not Guilty” of murder. And it certainly does not mean that there is anything wrong or “broken” about our criminal justice system. It just means that the system continues to work as the founding fathers of this country intended it to work more than two hundred years ago. To complain about or harass those of us who keep this system working isn’t just wrong, it is downright un-American.