The news is in and I passed the California State Bar of July 2006. And, yes, it does feel good to have done this on the first try.

Now some friends are renewing a question I’ve heard several times before: Why criminal defense? Why would I want to “put criminals back on the street”?

The answer is simple: I don’t. What I do want to do is to work to make sure the system is just and that prosecutors have to prove their cases. We’ve moved from a society that cared about justice, to one that pays it lip service. We no longer honor the Constitutions of either the United States, or of the States in which we live. Too many prosecutors — at least the ones I’ve been watching — forget that their job is to ensure a just result. Instead, they overcharge (someone punches a guy in the nose; the prosecutor says, “that could have killed him”; and charges him with attempted murder) and they use dirty cops (cops lie much more often than most people believe) or violate the law themselves, because they think it’s the right thing to do. The ends justify the means.

So long as things like this happen, I’ll believe that I have to go into criminal defense.