[A]n advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, amongst them, to himself, is his first and only duty; and in performing this duty he must not regard the alarm, the torments, the destruction which he may bring upon others. Separating the duty of a patriot from that of an advocate, he must go on reckless of the consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion.
Lord Brougham - in defending Queen Caroline at her trial in the House of Lords, 1821
Zeal is an accepted element of advocacy for lawyers, an aspect of client loyalty. The late ethicist Monroe Freedman has written that Lord Brougham set the standard of lawyerly excellence. But that is the world of private advocacy. We hold public lawyers - particularly prosecutors to a different standard. They are to seek justice, not victory. As the United States Department of Justice Principles of Federal Prosecution directs its lawyers and Agents to remember
the basic responsibilities of federal attorneys: making certain that the general purposes of the criminal law—assurance of warranted punishment, deterrence of further criminal conduct, protection of the public from offenders, and rehabilitation of offenders—are adequately met, while making certain also that the rights of individuals are scrupulously protected.
The ethic of prosecutors thus understood demands loyalty only to the truth, the public interest and the rectification of errors, as seen in ABA MRPC 3.8 Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor. In Georgia recently lawyers for Donald j.Trump, a defendant in a criminal case, moved to disqualify the Atlanta, Georgia District Attorney alleging that the elected District Attorney Fani Willis financially benefited from her personal relationship with Nathan Wade - whom she hired.
The issue of "appearance of impropriety: is explained this way by Judge McAfee:
reasonable questions about whether the District Attorney and her hand-selected lead SADA Special Assistant District Attorney testified untruthfully about thet iming of their relationship further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to correct reptational and other damage..
Judge Scott McAfee, of Superior Court in Atlanta in a 28 page opinion found that the appearance of impropriety RPC 1.2 Comments compelled one of the lawyers to withdraw. It was Wade who was fulsomely praised by D.A. Willis in a letter accepting his resignation.
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