Lawyers can’t refuse brief, no matter who the client: SC

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Krishnadas Rajagopal Tags : Declares Bar resolutions, assassins of Mahatma Gandhi and Indira
Gandhi, Dr Binayak Sen Posted: Wed Dec 08 2010, 03:08 hrs New Delhi:

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Citing past instances of lawyers defending assassins of Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi to the ones who
represented Dr Binayak Sen, accused of links with Naxals, the Supreme Court has ruled that lawyers cannot
refuse a brief, no matter what the profile of the client is.
“Every person, however wicked, depraved, vile, degenerate, perverted, loathsome, execrable, vicious or
repulsive he may be regarded by society, has a right to be defended in a court of law and correspondingly it
is the duty of the lawyer to defend him,” a Bench led by Justice Markandeya Katju said. Dated December 6,
the judgment was released on Tuesday.
The SC declared “null and void” any resolutions so far passed by bar associations across India which ban a
lawyer from being an “attorney for the damned”. “We declare all such resolutions... null and void and right
minded lawyers should ignore and defy such resolutions if they want democracy and rule of law to be
upheld in this country,” the apex court declared.
As long as the client is willing to pay the fee and the lawyer is not otherwise engaged, no practising legal practitioner
can afford to shirk defending a person “who is alleged to be a terrorist or an accused of a brutal or heinous crime or a
rapist” on the ground that it will make him (the lawyer) unpopular or that it is personally dangerous, the court said.
Justice Katju, who wrote the judgment, ordered its circulation to all high courts and state bar councils. The verdict
came in a petition regarding a resolution passed by the Coimbatore Bar Association that no member would defend
policemen accused of violence against lawyers, in a clash between lawyers and police in 2007.
Justice Katju referred to lawyers from both fact and fiction to enunciate. his point. He talked of the original “Attorney
for the Damned”, the legendary American lawyer Clarence Darrow who only took the briefs of “repulsive and
loathsome persons”; and cited the strength of Indian lawyers who defended “revolutionaries in Bengal during British
rule”, “Indian Communists in the Meerut conspiracy case”, and “the alleged assassins of Mahatma Gandhi and Indira
Gandhi”.
Justice Katju also cited Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mocking Bird, who defended a Black man
falsely accused of raping a White woman (a capital offence at the time in Alabama). “The following words of Atticus
Finch will ring throughout in history,” he said. “Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It is knowing you are
licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes
you do.”