“Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.”
--From ‘Henry the Sixth’
BY THIS TIME lawyer bashers must know that the line from Shakespeare's play doesn't malign lawyers and instead praises them as "guardians" of law and order.
Dick the Butcher is a henchman of Cade, a rebel who wanted to sow anarchy and topple the king.
To push his utopian idea, Cade spread the slander that all lawyers do is "shuffle parchments back and forth in a systematic attempt to ruin the common people."
Fiction aside, those who in real life hate lawyers (for alleged propensity for litigation, obscure language and fat fees) don't go around gunning them down.
Those who killed local lawyers like Noel Archival (executed Tuesday, along with two companions, on a deserted stretch of highway in Dalaguete, Cebu) were not trying to bring anarchy. Similar murders of lawyers were mostly instigated by people mad over their defeat in court cases that stripped them of land or quelled their "quest for justice" over the death of kin or loved one.
Face of enemy
The other lawyer is the face of the enemy, next only as object of wrath to the person who drags the complainant or respondent to court. Often the opposing lawyer is blamed for the adverse result. Canadian national John Pope who went on a shooting rampage at the MBF Hall of Justice last Jan. 22, 2013 targeted lawyers, prosecutors and judges who, he believed, caused his woes.
Criminal lawyers like Archival are high-risk professionals -- and Shakespeare and the rallying cry of lawyer bashers have nothing to do with it.
(paseares@gmail.com)