A Lawyer Dog in Training

Photo by Brenda VanCuick

Recently, in Louisiana, when the police were interrogating a suspect, the suspect invoked his right to counsel by telling the interrogator, “Just give me a lawyer, dogg.”  The court — twisting and contorting plain language and basic legal principles to reach its predetermined outcome, as courts are known to do — found that such language was not an invocation of the right to counsel.  The interrogator simply would have no way of knowing whether this suspect was asking for “a lawyer, dogg,” or a “lawyer dog.”  One writer for WaPo observed: “It’s not clear how many lawyer dogs there are in Louisiana, and whether any would have been available to represent the human suspect in this case[.]”

This type of embarrassing judicial decision-making is common, particularly in the area of Miranda where judicial “reasoning” is especially “flexible” in order to reach the courts’ foregone conclusions.  But this particular Louisiana decision has created a new market in legal services across the country: The Lawyer Dog.

My office-mate Brenda has a dog named Marley (pictured, above, assisting me with a motion to suppress a defendant’s statements) who is currently training to become a Lawyer Dog.  Marley expects to be licensed in all fifty states by the end of this year, and will charge a flat fee of $100 per pre-interrogation consultation.  

In the meantime, to learn about similarly extreme (and embarrassing) judicial contortions of plain language, law, and logic in the context of Miranda and interrogations, read my SMU article The New Miranda Warning or my book Anatomy of a False Confession.