Ethics Criminal Defense Lawyer

The professional ethics of criminal defense lawyers are rules of conduct the lawyers have to obey when they are engaged in criminal defense. The modern professional ethics of criminal defense is normative and technical, and it is a kind of role ethics which has specific social functions of guiding, evaluating and integrating. The criminal defense lawyers’ performance is not related to the interests of their clients, but also has some thing to do with the interests of the criminal victims, the value of criminal judicial justice and the development of legal profession. In our country, more and more emphasis is putting on the protection of suspect and defendant’s right, the antagonism of the criminal procedure is stronger and stronger, and the room for lawyers to enter criminal is wider and wider. In such backgrounds, the significance of proceeding several study on professional ethics of criminal defense lawyers is more realistic.The major topic of this paper is the leading conception of professional ethics of criminal defense lawyers which emerged from and got developed in adversary criminal procedure. From the perspective of historical origin, the formation and development of adversary criminal procedure was promoted by lawyers, and this procedure made the lawyers take the responsibility of devoting themselves to defending for their clients, all of these make the lawyer appear to be especially active. As a result, the study on professional ethics of criminal defense lawyers was more usual and thorough in countries adopted adversary criminal procedure. Different views theories were put forward and a leading one was formatted. This leading conception consists of three elements:the theory of role morality, the reasons provided by adversary criminal procedure to exempt defense lawyers from responsibilities, and the standard concept of lawyers’responsibility. However, because of the negative effects created by performance of the professional ethics of criminal defense lawyers which was consistent with the leading conception, more and more people questioned it. The author primarily listed three kinds of queries, they are queries to the guiding function of the normative professional ethics, the three elements of the leading conception and the absolute confidentiality obligation, and the author have responded to them in the paper.The other topic is the reflection to the professional ethics of criminal defense lawyers in our country. As the as the current situation, the public’s opinion about defense lawyers’ professional ethics is different from the lawyers’. People always hope the lawyers could obey to moral rules in high standards in their operations, and tend to evaluate lawyers’ professional performance with public morality opinions. However, criminal defense lawyers is trying to mold themselves into an occupational group like the one in American, they’d like to obey to the professional ethics which was consistent with the leading conception. At the same time, there are some problems in our current rules. All in all, because of the specificity of our lawyer profession, the kind of professional ethics which is highly consistent with the leading conception can not works very well in our country.