Lapidus on defending guilty criminals: “Sick to the stomach”

Leksand extended the winning streak beat AIK

He was the lawyer who saddled up and became a full-time writer. In Renée’s bridge sheep Jens Lapidus the question of how you as a lawyer approach defending someone who you KNOW is guilty of a terrible crime.

— My answer looks a little different today, five years after I quit being a lawyer. Now I can give a slightly more honest answer, which is like this: Stomach ache, lying thinking about it, getting anxiety. I have to do my job and get the person acquitted – but what if he gets acquitted and goes and rapes another person? he says to Renée Nyberg.

Jens Lapidus: “Got anxiety”
As a lawyer, you have to learn to live with it, he believes.

— If you work for many years as a lawyer, you learn to remove those thoughts, which I also did. But now in retrospect, I can remember that, in some difficult cases where it was a heinous crime that was alleged, I thought it was sickeningly difficult and got anxiety from that duplicity.

Therapy to write off
The writing began even before he was a finished lawyer. When he set things up, a whole new world opened up for him: gang crime. It was exciting, but also a way to process what he was told.

“I think that many criminal lawyers either reach for the bottle, need to go and talk to someone or, as in my case, write to get the shit out of them,” he says.

Lapidus has become cynical about it – see the clip in the player above

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