Forever Bound

Does your attorney have your best interest in mind? Is your attorney really doing all an attorney can do to ensure you aren’t convicted of a crime you never committed?

Rosa Norway represented criminal defendants throughout middle Tennessee, and she used every trick in the book to ensure her clients were exonerated. But when Angelo Bonaventura retained her to represent him after he had been charged with murder, and she eventually concluded he was in fact guilty, suddenly her position became unclear. She had represented him many times as concerned other matters, but always concluded he was innocent. This time was different. The murder he committed hit close to home–the victim was a friend. She quickly became involved in a complicated mixture of legal and ethical issues, to which there seemed to be no clear-cut answer.

Rosa had to decide whether to withdraw from further representation and perhaps see Angelo set free or continue to represent him while violating the canons of ethics, but ensuring a conviction–one path morally correct, but ethically incorrect, the other path morally incorrect, but ethically correct. How she arrives at a conclusion concerning the problem, and which path she ultimately followed, is completely unpredictable. What should she have done? What would you have done?

More importantly, what would your attorney have done?