In the meantime, there was no way that his client could have given him those details of the other rapes unless he had committed them, so the lawyer knows that he is guilty of the other crimes. Whether the lawyer is concerned about his client and whether he will be prosecuted for the other crimes if he tells the D.A. must cross the lawyer's mind. However, the fact that the client was almost gloating about the way he did not get caught and how he will get out of prison 'while he is young and can still have some fun' would likely be upsetting to the moral compass of the lawyer.
Those who argue that lawyers do not have morals are misguided. Lawyers simply do what they are required to do for their jobs and try to uphold the ethical standards of their profession. There are times when their own personal morality and ethical opinions get in their way, but they must learn to separate how they feel in their personal lives from what they are required to do in their professional lives. This is not always an easy thing to do for anyone who has a job where this might become necessary, and people's lives can hang in the balance and be forever altered by what a lawyer does in and out of the courtroom.
Conclusion
As can be seen from the information provided in the previous pages, there are two dilemmas at work here: moral and ethical. There are also two separate issues to contend with: what will happen to the lawyer's client and what will happen to the wrongly-convicted man who is in prison for the past rapes. What...
If the lawyer decides to do nothing, that will end the story at that point and the wrongly-convicted man will simply serve the time for the crimes that the jury thought he committed. However, if the lawyer is willing to say something to the D.A., the potential for life-changing events will come into play.
The ball, then, will be in the D.A.'s court. The fact that the lawyer has presented new-found information does not necessary mean that the D.A. has to or will bother to do anything with it. That will be up to his or her discretion. Presumably the case would be reopened and re-investigated, culminating in the release of the innocent man who is currently doing time for the crimes, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case. Instead, the D.A. may not feel that there is enough evidence to release the other man or may not feel as though he or she is able to proceed based on what the lawyer has to say.
This would be unfortunate for the man in prison on a false charge, but it would no longer be a moral and ethical problem for the lawyer because he would have said what needed to be said and left it in someone else's hands. Going against his client and giving this information to the D.A. might be seen as ethically wrong in the eyes of some people, but allowing an innocent man to spend years in prison for something that he clearly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, did not do would be morally wrong, and most people will put personal morals before business ethics.
