Excerpt from the book:

In many ways the lawyer is an appropriate example of hypocrisy in civilized society. He or she is trained to defend the innocent and the guilty, the exploited and the exploiter, the government and the law-breaker, the criminal and his victim. Ironically, the noble concept that everyone is innocent until proven guilty has been perverted by lawyers into the ignoble practice of proving that the guilty person is innocent. In the legal profession hypocrisy is not only pervasive; it is indispensable.

There is an absurd anomaly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition: although witnesses and litigants are compelled to swear that they will tell the truth and nothing but the truth, lawyers are permitted to lie. Lawyers for the defense are expected to pretend that their clients are always innocent; prosecutors are required to pretend that all accused persons are guilty.

Another absurdity results from good intentions; in the United States, before a conversation can be recorded electronically, all the participants must agree to permit the recording. Since few criminals are eager to confess on tape that they have committed crimes, irrefutable evidence on electronic recordings is often ruled inadmissible in court. So murderers who admitted killings on tape have gone free. And a man who told a policeman where he buried the body of a little girl he had killed was permitted to have that confession thrown out of court because the policeman had not properly cautioned him.

A defense lawyer in Colorado persuaded a judge, and two subsequent Appellate Courts, that his client's confession should be thrown out because the defendant had been coerced. The coercion, the lawyer explained, had been committed not by the police but by God, who disturbed the murderer's conscience so much that he confessed. The Supreme Court eventually restored sanity by over-ruling the Appellate Court.

Again and again we see the unreliability of appearances. In thousands of law cases honest witnesses describe the same event in contradictory terms. In numerous law cases honest witnesses identify innocent persons as guilty, and fail to identify the guilty. Erie Stanley Gardner, a lawyer before he became a writer of popular detective stories, once wrote an article listing twelve cases of misidentification that he had observed. There is no litmus paper test or divining rod that infallibly reveals the truth.