Beneath Contempt

It is well understood that in the profession of law and legal defence of someone charged with a criminal offence, a lawyer is charged to do his or her utmost on behalf of a client.  However, in some instances, the challenge to play the advocate on behalf of someone charged with a truly odious defence should have its moral limits, and yet remain well within all the parameters that justice demands.

An adult male who has furthermore a deep knowledge of what is immoral or otherwise, but is still capable of physically sexually attacking a child of ten, repeatedly raping her, threatening her if she informs of what he has done, is beyond reprehensible.  A lawyer, who despite all the incriminating evidence that is beyond dispute that his client committed this dreadful series of acts is himself despicable in defending that client.

All the more so when his defence of his client leads him to charge the child - now three years older, and still a child, having just reached her teen years - with mischief in claiming herself to have been raped by the man, a former custodian of the law himself, as an RCMP officer whose disgraceful conduct in other areas led him to be taken off active duty and held in suspension by the Force.  And whose total disintegration as a human being was completed when he murdered a policeman.

Now, it is the action of Kevin Gregson's lawyer, Craig Fleming, that can be called into question.  By arguing on behalf of his client that the girl - who was ten years old and who trusted him before she was repeatedly raped by Gregson - of giving false evidence though she implored him to leave her alone, and who suffered grievous physical harm above and beyond the psychological pain caused her - it is clear his manner reflects a total lack of humanity.

Doctors who examined the little girl after her claims of having been raped explained that they had never seen a more obvious physical manifestation of violence perpetrated against a child.  Gregson's DNA was recovered along with that of the little girl, and held as hard evidence in the nerve-numbing assaults.  Lawyer Craig Fleming seems to feel he has a trump card in the fact that the child cannot recall what her assaulter was wearing when he first raped her.

This man, in pursuit of his profession, and possibly a reputation as someone with a deviously clever mind has only succeeded in portraying himself as an ignorant lout dedicated not to justice but to advancing his career at the expense of a child's self-awareness and dignity.  He is clearly demonstrating his incapacity as a lawyer, as someone with a readily-shelved conscience.