One of the things I discuss in my book “Minority Viewpoint – my experience, as a person of color, with the American justice system” is the question about what to do when your legal team says that the judges made a mistake and the judges say that appropriate evidence was not brought forward.
This is something that puzzled me a lot. I understand that my lawyer might believe that the judges made a mistake, but I was shocked to hear the same thing even from the managing partner of the law firm. I understand that judges can make mistakes and that is why the legal system allows the appeal process. But is it appropriate for the lawyer and/or the law firm to continue to believe that the judges made a mistake, even after hearing the decision from the appeal process. I think it is very important for the legal professionals to accept the fact that there is a good possibility that either the case did not have merit right from the beginning or that we were just not able to provide the kind of evidence that the judges were looking for.
I have given an example in the book about professional sports teams dealing with bad calls. I know that the best coaches in all professional sports will never accept that they lost a game just because of one or more bad calls and they certainly will never allow their players to believe that they would have won the game had it not been for the bad calls. I believe that the best professional teams work hard to prepare themselves well so they can win games in spite of some bad calls. I think this can be a good example to look at for the legal community. I believe if the professional lawyers focus more on doing the utmost to prepare their cases (just like the example of the best professional sports teams), then they would likely not have to worry about judges’ mistakes.