Milton never commands - he only manipulates. He's quite agile with reverse psychology. He offers Lomax a chance to quit a career-making case so that he can take care of his ailing wife, but Lomax will have none of it, even when Milton assures him that no one will think less of him. Practicing Law in Hollywood Over and over again, I see Hollywood and other non-lawyers unable to define the true ethical dilemmas facing lawyers. In real life, most lawyers would agree that guilty defendants do deserve legal representation no matter how heinous the crime.
Somebody has to represent the child molester and the serial murderer.
If all lawyers refused to represent guilty defendants, our system would fall apart around our ears. Lomax's representation of the child molester at the opening of the story is portrayed as the moment Lomax chose the dark side of the force. He elicited from the child that she blackmailed some of her peers into making up similar stories so that she wouldn' t be alone in her victimhood. Thus, he destroyed her credibility and won an acquittal for his client. It seemed to me that if the prosecutor and police were so inept that they didn't investigate the other children's stories of abuse, didn't charge the defendant with additional crimes, and didn't know how to rehabilitate the child witness with a psychological expert, they weren't doing their job properly.