Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, truth-seeking ought to take precedence over

First of all, **my opponent is cheating**. He loses. This debate has a character limit of 8,000. His Round 3 argument was 30,534 characters. I checked because I was curious why his argument seemed to be dragging *on and on* when my argument seemed so much shorter. It's because my argument was below the character limit and his is almost *three times* longer than what the character limit allows. He should automatically lose the debate for cheating. There are various ways to accomplish this cheat, which I won't describe for you because I don't want to facilitate cheating. But just be aware that methods exist, and my opponent undoubtedly used one of them. He should lose the debate because (1) his conduct was egregious and he needs to be taught a lesson, and (2) there's no way I can respond to 4 rounds worth of arguments in one round, so it's an otherwise unremediable infraction. Second, even if instead you simply limit his Round 3 to the first 8,000 characters he posted, he still loses. With only 8,000 characters, his argument would have ended right before the "Bankim Thanki" piece of evidence, so I'll respond just to those arguments. R1) Lawyers sometimes have evidence that could exonerate someone My opponent gives an example of how two lawyers knew that an innocent man was in prison for a crime he didn't commit because their client told them that *he* had murdered the McDonald's security guard. However, my opponent is confusing "attorney-client privilege" with "the duty of confidentiality." "Attorney-client privilege" is an evidentiary rule that nothing a client says to an attorney can be admitted in court. "Confidentiality" is an ethical duty (imposed on every lawyer by state bar rules), which requires the attorney not to disclose anything his or her client says to *anyone.* Confidentiality and privilege are not the same thing. If a lawyer breaches his duty of confidentiality and tells the government that his client said he was guilty, the lawyer can be disciplined by the state bar for breaching confidentiality, but the lawyer's admission would still not be *admissible* in court because the privilege still applies to protect the client. The reason the two lawyers in the McDonald's murder did not reveal the information they knew until their client died was because they owed a duty of *confidentiality* to their client. Privilege had nothing do with it. Just because truth-seeking takes precedence over privilege in the world of the Affirmative does not mean that the duty of *confidentiality* seeks to exist. The same thing that happened in the McDonald's murder case would still happen in the word of the Affirmative because lawyers will still owe *ethical* duties to their clients (which have nothing to do with the rules of evidence). R2) Line-by-line rebuttal of cards My opponent does what is known in Policy and LD debate as a "card dump," meaning he just reads a bunch of "cards" one right after the other, without really analyzing or explaining any of them. A "card" is a citation followed by a long, full paragraph quote from the source. I'll refute each of these cards in turn. The Melanie Leslie evidence and Thomas Gylnn evidence state the obvious: that attorney-client privilege is in conflict with the value of truth-seeking. However, neither card takes the position that truth-seeking should win out over privilege. In fact, if you read an ethics textbook for lawyers, the book will be quite frank that the privilege and confidentiality rules are deeply troubling, but will ultimately take the position that they are a necessary evil in order to have a civilized system of criminal justice. The Thane Rosenbaum evidence is irrelevant. It is criticizing plea bargaining, and the fact that people sometimes plead down to a lesser offense that they did not actually commit (e.g. someone charged with rape pleads down to "assault"). I agree with Rosenbaum's very general point that truth-seeking is "important," but the focus of this debate is whether truth-seeking is *so* important (and is so incapable of being achieved through other means) that we must destroy the attorney-client relationship by forcing attorney's to testify against their own clients. Now we arrive at the Bankim Thanki evidence. My opponent already ran out of characters before introducing this evidence, but I'd like to allow it because it's actually a Neg card. I'll clean up the quote a bit, but it said, "Truth, like all other good things, may be loved unwisely; may be pursued too keenly; may cost too much. And surely the meanness and the mischief of prying into a man's confidential communications with his legal adviser . . . are too great a price to pay for truth itself." Basically, the Thanki evidence is reiterating my point from last round: that the price for truth can be too high. We don't torture people to reach the truth. We don't break into their houses whenever we feel like it to see if they are up to no good. There are *other* values besides truth, including that a civilized society must have rights for the accused (even if he is guilty) and that the "optics" of a government that tortured, violated the sanctity of people's homes, and forced people's lawyers to testify against them is just *too bad*, to the point that we are afraid doing these things would make people lose confidence in the criminal justice system and feel like they are living in a police state. Furthermore, my opponent drops the argument that abolishing the privilege will do *no good* because lawyers will be required (at the pain of facing a malpractice suit) to tell their clients *not* to tell them anything. Abolishing the privilege simply makes it really hard for lawyers to do their jobs, but has no other truth-seeking benefits. A lawyer would have a hard time arguing insanity or self-defense without the client admitting to the crime, so client's legal defenses are severely curtailed in the Affirmative world, thus denying Americans the Sixth Amendment guarantee of *effective* assistance of counsel (not the *neutered* assistance of counsel that would exist in a regime where clients could not talk openly and honestly with their lawyers). My opponent also drops the argument that the government already has *plenty* of other ways to find out the truth. Another one of my opponent's cards (introduced after the character limit was reached) makes a similar point by explaining that the *facts* underlying an attorney-client communication are discoverable, but the conversation itself is not. Furthermore, the attorney-client privilege actually increases truth because it allows lawyers to prevent their clients from perjuring themselves on the witness stand. There is an ethical rule saying that lawyers cannot suborn perjury. If a client says, "I did it," the lawyer then cannot later put the client on the stand and have the client say, "no, I didn't do it. I have an alibi." Instead, the lawyer would advise the client to exercise his constitutional right not to testify. Thus, the privilege -- by encouraging people to tell their lawyers things -- actually enhances truth-seeking because it prevents self-interested clients from perjuring themselves to try to win the case. In conclusion, privilege rules are sometimes an "evil" -- in that they trade off with the value of truth-seeking -- but they are a *necessary* evil because you cannot have a fair criminal justice system without them.