ABSTRACT
There is growing awareness that a new lawyer role is emerging in American criminal litigation, separating itself from the traditional criminal defense role in ways that raise new issues of professional responsibility and ethics, both for the new role and for the traditional role of the criminal defense attorney. For want of a better term we may style this new role "innocence lawyer". We believe that, whatever adjustments should be made to current rules to take account of the special role of the innocence lawyer, because of our extensive explanations concerning the conditions and limitations we put on our post-conviction role, both in our application and otherwise, we are in full compliance with existing American professional responsibility rules, including those in the jurisdiction in which we now work, New Jersey. Both the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the New Jersey Rules of Professional Conduct contain the same applicable language.
