When I was about eight years old - in 1995 - I was in my father's car, being driven somewhere. I remember that my mother was in the car too. My brother might have been; I'm not sure.
I knew that my father, Richard S. Kopsick, was an attorney. I was asking him some questions about his job.
I remember asking him either "Have you ever defended someone you knew was guilty?", or "What happens when a lawyer is asked to defend someone they know is guilty?".
I don't remember what my father's exact response to my question was, but I remember being dissatisfied. I'm pretty sure that he said something related to the duty of a defense attorney to do his best to defend his client.
I later found out that this duty is referred to as the "duty of adequate representation", and is part of our rights as recognized in the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Knowing what I know now, it seems fair to conclude that - when the defense knows the defendant is guilty - the duty of adequate representation can only be exercised honorably, if the defense uses mitigation of the seriousness of the crime, rather than outright denial that the crime took place.
I cannot say for sure that attorney Alan Dershowitz has violated any particular law, or else egregiously violated the code of ethics expected of defense attorneys. But it is difficult to deny the possibility that Dershowitz has been involved in conflicts of interest, and has based a career off of using the duty of adequate representation to justify taking bets - with big payoffs - on clients who (almost always) seem obviously guilty.
After all, Dershowitz defended Jeffrey Epstein for sex trafficking charges, even though Dershowitz became a co-defendant, with Epstein, against the charges filed by Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Moreover, Dershowitz wrote a book called The Abuse Excuse, which arguably diminishes the seriousness of sex crimes against minors; and even penned a 1997 editorial in the Los Angeles Times declaring statutory rape to be an "outdated concept".
In that editorial, Dershowitz points to the scandal surrounding Michael Kennedy having a relationship with a former babysitter, whom he met when she was somewhere between 14 and 16, when 16 was the age of consent in Massachusetts. Kennedy died in a skiing accident shortly after the scandal broke.
I bring up Alan Dershowitz because I certainly don't want the people who are accused of trafficking and molesting children, to be themselves represented in court by possible child molesters; especially not by their accomplices.
I bring up Michael Kennedy because, when vacationing in Spain together in late April 2019, I talked to my father about several topics related to child molestation, as a way of indirectly venting my frustration about recovering memories of him molesting me.
During that conversation, we discussed Joe Biden's child groping, and the scandal surrounding Kathy Shelton's claims against Hillary Clinton. At some point, my father named a situation in which the age of consent laws might not apply, and/or in which the relationship of trust no longer exists between the people involved.
My father named the Michael Kennedy scandal as an example of when that relationship of trust no longer exists, implying that sex was OK between Kennedy and the then 14- to 16-year-old girl. Kennedy was about 34 when the affair began, according to the link below.
Due to these facts, I cannot help but feel like my father was, at the very least, taking a page out of Dershowitz's "child molestation defense playbook" by naming the Michael Kennedy scandal, when Dershowitz had done the same.
At the very worst, my father might have been hitting on me. Why would my father - whom at that point knew that I had told my mother that he had molested me as a child, and had calmed down about it enough to assent to go on a trip with him - start talking about dissolving relationships of trust? If not to teach me about the law, then it's possible that he was suggesting that he and I are no longer bound by the parental relationship because I am now an adult.
Is that really so implausible? My father grew up in the 70s, and loves the music of the 1960s and 1970s. He is a late Baby Boomer, born in 1957. Baby Boomers, and the hippies before them, grew up with the sounds of the 1960s, which include all kinds of musical acts who... molested children. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Bill Wyman, and others "slept with" 13-year-olds. "Groupies" as young as 13 and 14 "slept with" (i.e., were raped by) Bowie and Jimmy Page. The excesses of the 1960s rock era, and especially the late 1970s punk era, desensitized Americans to the seriousness of statutory rape.
Why would Americans notice, amidst all this, that John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, was carrying on a sexual relationship with his own daughter Mackenzie for ten years? When news of this broke, media outlets reported it as if it was consensual.
It's not inconceivable that my father is another touchy-feely wannabe hippie who has no boundaries, and uses that lack of boundaries to desensitize people to unwanted touching of children by adults, and who would be the sort of person to take his son to a foreign country and suggest they engage in "consensual" sex.
Maybe he was just trying to teach me about the law. Nevertheless, during the first night of that trip, I spent the first few hours in bed just laying awake, knowing that I was sleeping right next to my father for the first time in years, and for the first time since I had confronted him and my mother about the past abuse.
This is why I am sad to announce that I have discovered something that I have been worried that I would discover, for the last several months. I found proof that my father defended a child molester in the past.
In 1993, the Chicago Tribune reported that my father, Richard Kopsick, defended a man named Kenneth Hasty, who was charged with initiating an unwanted attempt at sex, at his own home, against a man who was then 19 years old.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-06-11-9306110377-story.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-08-06-9308060436-story.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-06-11-9306110377-story.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-08-06-9308060436-story.html
Hasty was 33 when this incident happened, which means he was 14 years older than the other party. It should be noted that the younger party's age of 19 years, made him a legal adult, but also a teenager, at the time. It's also noteworthy that the "attempt at sex" occurred at Hasty's home; so with that "home advantage" and his advanced age, it's hard to imagine the younger party being the aggressor in that situation.
Judge Raymond McKoski found Kenneth Hasty guilty of battery. The Chicago Tribune reported that - as of June 11th, 1993 - Hasty faced "up to 7 years in prison". This was for violating probation. Hasty had sexually abused a 15-year-old boy, and was sentenced to probation in 1991. That incident occurred at Hasty's home in Waukegan, and was described by Robert Enstad of the Tribune as "a similar incident". The Tribune reported that Hasty would be sentenced on July 23rd, 1993.
In summary, the judge in Hasty's case, ruled against my father's defensive argument, which was that the 19-year-old initiated the attempt at sex.
It's hard to imagine that - as Hasty's defense attorney - my father did not know that Hasty was on probation. My father must have known this fact, given that the duty of adequate representation arguably obligates him to be aware of any negative potential consequences of his client being convicted.
If my father knew that Hasty was on probation, then he must have known what Hasty was on probation for (which was making unwanted sexual advances towards teenage boys at his house). Therefore, my father must have known that Kenneth Hasty had an emerging pattern of predacious behavior, at least insofar as he had then (in 1993) been accused of the same sort of crime a second time.
Now, arguably any lawyer should have and would have known this, which is why you can make the case that somebody had to defend Kenneth Hasty. Well, why can't that person be Kenneth Hasty? Why does it have to be a man with a six-year-old and a four-year-old at home? We are guaranteed the right to counsel if we request it. If the laws were simpler, the accused could more easily defend themselves without the help of an attorney.
Kenneth Hasty was under no obligation - at least - to request or accept assistance with his legal defense. So why must it fall to my father - or anyone else - to defend him?
The answer to this is the same as the answer to the question, "Why must it fall to Hillary Rodham to defend the man accused of raping Kathy Shelton?" And I asked my father this question, in several forms, in Spain in 2019.
It all comes back to the duty of the attorney to adequately represent his or her client.
Well, the last time I checked, nobody told any particular attorney to work at any particular law firm. if you're assigned to a client you know is guilty, and you're being pressured to distort the truth or deny the truth instead of mitigate the seriousness of the crime to get a light sentence, then you can quit that law firm.
I knew this in my heart as an eight-year-old, when I had that conversation in the car with my dad, but have only been able to articulate it intellectually now.
I must now struggle to come to terms with the fact that, in 1993, my father defended someone whom he must have reasonably known was a child molester, and then two years later found himself trying to weasel out of his eight-year-old son's question "What happens when you defend someone you know is guilty?".
I must come to the terms with the fact that I had a better sense of morality, about legal matters, at the age of eight, than my father apparently did at the age of thirty-eight (and evidently still feels the same way).
I also have to come to terms with the fact that, when I was six, my father defended Kenneth Hasty after he presumably knew Hasty had posed as a basketball recruiter in order to initiate attempts at sex with teenage boys. My brother was involved in youth basketball programs at school, and I cannot remember any point when my father warned me or my brother about people potentially posing as basketball recruiters to entice us into sex.
It's not that my parents didn't warn us at all about "stranger danger"; they did. It's just that, when we became aware that an old man had gone into the Lake Bluff pool showers in the early 1990s, to try to touch little boys' penises, our mother informed us, but there was an air of "this isn't such a serious issue" in the way people at the pool were talking about it.
And our parents' warnings about kidnappers never really carried with them, a definite and memorable "kidnappers might want something sexual" lesson. Because of what we knew about kidnappers from television and the Hardy Boys book series, we assumed that kidnappers just wanted money.
I remember being about seven years old, at my grandfather's house with my grandpa and my dad, seeing a report on TV about a guy who molested a child, who was giggling after saying he'd been accused of touching a girl's "private parts", but for some reason, it didn't even occur to me until I was about thirty that the word "kidnapping" applies to what Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did. "Kidnapping" involves any incident of child trafficking, or moving or removal of children or minors for the purposes of sex. Why we aren't using the word "kidnapping" more often, to me, reflects apathy and the use of the euphemisms "underage sex trafficking" and "underage prostitution". But "kidnapping" is an inadequate term itself, because it too is a euphemism. "Child rape and abduction" is a better descriptor.
We must be cautious that the overuse of the specific legal terms for these heinous crimes, should not lead to a desensitization to the crimes. The way we speak of child rape should not make us or our children susceptible to abduction. We must teach our children to use the proper terms for their genitals, so that child molesters cannot easily molest kids by making up pet names for their genitals that are secrets to just the child and the abuser. And we must ensure that the terms we use for these crimes, reflect their horrifying nature, rather than taking the sting out of the crime by covering it up with pleasant language.
Parents need to be honest with their children, and governments need to be honest with the people.
I did not become a lawyer, for a reason.
I have known since I was eight that I would be expected to go above and beyond the scope of duty to defend people I know are guilty. And I have suspected since my early 20s that if I became a lawyer, I would be soon thereafter disbarred for "disrupting" the voir dire (jury selection) process by helping to fully inform potential jurors of their rights as jurors.
If you are being pressured to study criminal law, then please consider going into political science instead. Or political theory, political philosophy, political ethics, political psychology, economics, history, or other fields in the humanities.
It is not enough to apply the law, we must also make the law just.
If nobody chooses to study how to make the law, and lawyers, more ethical, then we will end up being governed by child molesting lawyers who defend child molesters for a living, instead of just being molested, creeped out, annoyed, and milked for money, by them.
Written and Published on March 6th, 2021
Edited, and Links Added,
on May 25th, 2021
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