Law Times

Law Times • March 11, 2013 Page 5 NEWS Greenspan defends importance of standing by society's outcasts BY YAMRI TADDESE Law Times P rominent criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan spent his 69th birthday telling a group of Ryerson University students about the importance of standing by people others vilify. "I don't think there's a more commonly asked question of me than, 'How? How can you defend those people?'" said Greenspan, who dropped by the Ted Rogers School of Management on Feb. 28 for a special lecture about his career and the legal system. It's a query that comes not just from students and people at cocktail parties but also judges speaking privately with him, Greenspan told the students. "Now, how many people believe that when somebody is charged with a crime that they are innocent?" he asked. "My own mother, God bless her, she thought everybody I acted for was guilty. But somebody's got to believe it. If the defence counsel doesn't believe it, then it's an empty and very shallow and meaningless section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms." Becoming a criminal lawyer had been a dream of Greenspan's father who died when Greenspan was just 13 years old. And it was in his father's books where Greenspan found his own passion for the profession. He has never wanted to be anything else, he said. Now, after several decades of experience as a defence lawyer, he believes his job involves the same sense of duty that doctors follow. "I don't understand the question that says to a doctor who walks into an operating room and operates on someone that he somehow has to do anything more than what his Hippocratic Oath says he has to do and that's save that person," he said. "And that person that he's saving may be an evil person, may be a bad person. What does it matter?" he added, emphasizing that the justice system makes legal calls, not moral ones. Sometimes, people use his children to challenge him. They ask how he can defend individuals charged with sexual assault when he has two daughters and three granddaughters, he noted. "I do not have sleepless nights because in the justice system, there are many actors," he said. "If there isn't a defence counsel in the room, it's going to be a very short trial." He added: "Criminal lawyers are the true protectors of democracy. They actually believe in it and it's a noble cause." The students, who came prepared with written questions, asked Greenspan for his thoughts on issues ranging from mandatory minimum prison terms to Conrad Black, whom he represented and later quarrelled with. (He declined to speak about Black.) Greenspan, who's teaching a political science course at Brock University, was vocal about his opposition to jailing people for long periods as a way of stopping others from committing crimes. "I've been doing criminal law now for 43 years," he said. "I don't think I've met one person that I've acted for who said, 'You know what, I'm going to get caught and I'm going to be looking at 20 years in jail and I'm not going to do it.' It's been demonstrated in numerous studies that general deterrence doesn't work." He further denounced prisons as a place where criminals come out more sophisticated and called the jail-induced cycle of crime "silly, stupid, and really wrong." People who commit crimes, he told the students, think less about what happens once police catch them and more about their chances of getting caught. If they don't believe they'll get caught, they give jail time little consideration before they break the rules, he added. The key, he said, is that people must "actually believe that the risk of getting caught is higher and therefore they might back down." Greenspan gave the example of U.S. states that saw their crime rates go down after they eliminated the death penalty. But when it "What are you talking about?" Greenspan fired back. "The international chiefs of police came to Toronto to have their conference 15 years ago and they heard our homicide rates in this country. . . . They thought they had died and gone to heaven. "There's always going to be crime. And the government's job is to scare the hell out of the public and make them think it's a serious crime so that they're doing something to bring it down." Mesmerized by Greenspan's blunt attitude, students giggled as they watched the heated exchange. In the end, they wanted to know what the famed criminal lawyer could tell them about law school, a place where many in the crowd plan to go. "If you don't have a romantic idea of what 'I do not have sleepless nights because in the justice system, there are many actors,' says Edward Greenspan. you want, you should give every course equal Photo: Al Gilbert, C.M. chance because you don't know where you're going to end up," he told them. comes to Canadian crime rates, Greenspan difAnd most importantly, "You should only do fered with his friend, Ryerson University distin- that which you love to do," he added. "You really guished counsel in residence Ralph Lean. should love what you do. If you don't have a pasLean disagreed with Greenspan's view of sion, you'll get by. . . . But it's what exhilarates me. Canada's crime rate as "extraordinarily low." It's what makes me practise until I'm 90." LT "Shouldn't you have a goal to have a zero homicide rate?" asked Lean. The question For video of Greenspan's lecture, see elicited a loud rebuff from Greenspan. lawtimesnews.com. 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