Many people repeat the phrase, “Justice will be served on a silver platter.”
I have always found the saying amusing.
Looking around this profession, I suppose silver platters are rather common. Polished desks, tailored suits, marble courthouses, and carefully rehearsed speeches — all the trappings of a system designed to look noble. It is enough to make me wonder whether people have mistaken the appearance of justice for justice itself.
Because real justice — the kind people dream of, the kind they pray for when they have nowhere else to turn — is not silver.
It is not bronze.
It is not some cheap metal stamped onto the participation medals we hand to children for simply showing up.
It is cold iron carried through bloodied hands. It is something you drag behind you long after the courtroom doors have closed and the cameras have gone home. It leaves marks. It leaves scars. It leaves questions that no verdict can answer.
People think my job is to find the truth.
They are wrong.
The truth is often the simplest part.
The truth is that a man committed a crime. The truth is that a family lost someone they loved. The truth is that somewhere, someone is suffering because of another person’s actions.
But the law does not deal in truth.
The law deals in proof.
And proof is a fragile thing.
It can be hidden, manipulated, destroyed, or discovered too late. It can depend on the memory of a frightened witness, the competence of an exhausted investigator, or the honesty of someone who has every reason to lie.
Every day, people like me stand between what happened and what can be proven. We hold the scales, but we do not control what is placed upon them.
Sometimes the guilty walk free.
Sometimes the innocent are condemned.
And every lawyer who claims otherwise is either a fool or a liar.
That is the heavy iron ball and chain of justice.
Ironic no? That the ones meant to be serving justice are actually the ones imprisoned.
I always tell people it’s the not knowing.
Not knowing whether the person sitting beside you deserves your defence.
But knowing that it does not matter.
Because the moment a lawyer decides who is worthy of the law, the law stops being justice and becomes revenge.
I have defended murderers.
I have defended thieves.
I have defended people whose actions made me sick.
And every time, I told myself the same thing:
I am not defending what they did.
I am defending what we believe.
A system where rights exist only for the few is not justice.
But there are nights when that belief becomes harder to carry.
Nights when you sit alone and wonder whether protecting the rules allowed someone else to break them.
Nights when you ask yourself whether morality and duty were ever truly the same thing, or whether we only pretend they are because the alternative is unbearable.
Maybe the darkness reminds me of the things I have done.
I have had to do.
Every lawyer has had to do…
Only the Devil knows who could do this job without a glass of whisky on the rocks at night.
Those nights.
The nights when the courtroom falls silent.
The nights when the verdict has already been read, but you still find yourself wondering whether you were protecting justice…
Or merely protecting the rules that allowed injustice to survive.
Maybe that is the cruellest part of justice.
It does not ask whether you can carry the weight.
It simply places it in your hands and waits to see how long before your fingers break.
For twenty-three years, I believed my duty was simple.
Protect the law.
Protect the innocent.
Protect the rights of every person who stood before me, regardless of what they had done.
I believed that if I held onto those principles tightly enough, I would never become the thing I fought against.
I was wrong.
And my fingers are breaking.
People often ask me if I regret what I did.
They always expect the answer to be yes.
They expect guilt to be simple. A wound that heals once you admit you were wrong.
But regret is a strange thing.
Because I do regret it.
And I don’t.
I regret the lives that were lost.
I regret the pain caused.
I regret knowing that if I had made a different choice, perhaps things would have been different.
But I do not regret defending him.
That is the part nobody understands.
Because the moment I admit I should have abandoned my duty, I admit that justice only belongs to those who deserve it.
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