Every young defense attorney wants to take a shot at some obscure defense, the most popular is the “necessity defense,” one of the few defenses listed in every code which lays out how a client can be proven innocent if the client basically had no choice. It never works.

But there is almost no defense for the rioters who descended upon the Capitol, either, and many of them want to go to trial, which requires their attorneys to come up with something, and apparently, 17 of them want to go with the “Public Authority” defense, by saying that Trump sanctioned the entire thing. We confess, we have never heard of such a thing. Oh, we have heard that Trump sanctioned the matter, we have never heard that it could create a defense:

From the Daily Beast:

Once a high-flying civil attorney, lawyer John Pierce has reinvented himself, in the face of mountains of debt, as a go-to lawyer for conservative causes célèbres.He represents 17 of the rioters charged. We presume he represents 17 o the wealthier ones:

In one court hearing, Pierce said he would pursue a “public authority defense”—an unusual legal tactic sometimes used by informants that would see him argue that his clients believed that the government, in the form of Donald Trump, had legally sanctioned their law-breaking.

Well, we do know that Trump sanctioned a lot of law-breaking throughout his term. Maybe this guy is on to something. No, not really. Pierce is not a defense attorney, and therefore he’s not an especially good defense attorney and it would take a tremendously good defense attorney to make a good public authority defense.

But he is MAGA through and through:

At times, Pierce’s Twitter rhetoric can sound as overheated as some of the Jan. 6 rioters. On July 16, as debates about the door-to-door vaccination campaigns raged on the right, Pierce tweeted that a federal employee knocking on your door called for “various calibers”—an apparent reference to shooting them.

At times, a lawyer’s legal “cause” can get in the way of their clients’ best interests and that’s a big problem that Pierce seems to need to guard against. Another thing one has to guard against, representing so many clients from the same incident that one forgets to treat each client individually, with individual facts that may make big differences in each individual case.

Pierce sounds like an ideologue that a defendant would do well to steer clear of, and not just because this “unheard of” defense is not going to work.

A top lawyer for Jan. 6 riot defendants has plenty of problems of his own, including a struggling legal case involving chimps, huge debts, and a staffer accused of defrauding an elderly woman of nearly $100K. https://t.co/xP0aVxDXdp

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) August 2, 2021

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