Samantha Runnion was a victim of perverse ideas. Not just the ideas that drove Alejandro Avila to kidnap, sexually assault and strangulate her, but also those that lawyers use to get defendants off who they know are guilty.
One such lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who helped O.J. Simpson walk and once said he would defend Hitler, wrote in 1982, “When defense attorneys represent guilty clients — as most do most of the time — their responsibility is to try, by all fair and ethical means, to prevent the truth about their clients guilt from emerging.”
In reality, suppressing the truth is never “fair and ethical.” A lawyer must always primarily uphold truth and justice.
Acting instead on Dershowitz’s cue, attorney John Pozza in January 2001 helped Avila walk from charges that he sexually molested two 9-year-old girls. He took Avila’s case despite compelling evidence against him and knowing he failed a polygraph test on these charges.
On Larry King Live, Pozza outright dismissed polygraph tests as “unreliable” and said that he didn’t ask Avila if he committed these crimes, nor did he want to know. Even if Avila had admitted his guilt to him, he would “still have to defend him,” he argued.
On Bill O’Reilly’s show, Richard Blumenfeld, a public lawyer who originally defended Avila at that time, also said he would still try a case if a defendant admits his guilt to him but wants to walk. In defending his position, Blumenfeld said, “If you went to a doctor because you had a loathsome disease and the doctor said to you, ‘Gee, Mr. O’Reilly, that’s really ugly, I don’t think I can treat that.’ How would you feel?