For Surely Someday...

shmaceattorney

the entire series in one screenshot

skullopendra

i just watched a Game Theory video about how phoenix wright is basically a fraud and a criminal, and while some of those videos have me going “:/”, like

he didn’t even have to REACH tbh?

phoenix throws innocent people who aren’t his client under the bus while he scrambles to come up with some bullshit reason his client didn’t do a crime.

he enters private dwellings without a warrant and submits the evidence thus acquired in the middle of court proceedings

like i understand this is the only way to increase the drama and to prevent the player from knowing EVERYTHING but the end result is that phoenix is a hack who has no idea what he’s doing and ignores simple rules about evidence discovery

hug-o-war

I can see how he would definitely look shady from the standpoint of an (Western, especially) Earthling living in the year 2016, but Ace Attorney takes place slightly in the future in a world that’s meant to parallel most aspects of our own but isn’t. Their legal system is completely different from ours and entering private dwellings without a warrant is perfectly legal. More than that, it’s expected. Lawyers are trained to behave in an almost dual capacity, acting as both attorneys and detectives.

You might have noticed that even the prosecution submits evidence willy-nilly, to the constant surprise of the defense, and presents autopsies altered based on ‘new findings’ at the drop of a hat - neither of which would be permissible in our own courts. You noted that it’s no great shocker that Phoenix lost his badge, but that loss was through no fault of his own. He was handling the case in question admirably, given how seemingly hopeless it was, when his license was stripped because another attorney entirely supplied him with fabricated evidence. He was given no chance to defend his innocence and, in their justice system’s true fashion, lost his badge.

It’s this sort of tomfoolery that makes it so difficult for defense attorneys in Ace Attorney’s universe to do their job. ‘Guilty until proven innocent’ is out the window. While prosecutors are each assigned a detective to make their work much simpler and likely have their salaries paid by the state, since they’re never seen to be prosecuting on behalf of any one individual, defense attorneys like Phoenix are forced to find their own clients and their own evidence. In the newest game they’re disdained even further, to the point that if a defense attorney loses a case they must suffer the same sentence as the defendant - up to and including execution!

It’s this toxic environment that leads to Phoenix’s struggle to defend clients he’s certain are innocent because if he behaved like one of our own defense attorneys every single one of his clients would have been found guilty. The game is so rigged against the defense that even with literal superpowers endowed by abilities and objects like Phoenix’s magatama every case is a challenge from start to finish. Phoenix isn’t the kind of man to lie because it’s the easy way out - he does it because his witnesses are stinking liars, the judge is incompetent, the prosecution is heavily favoured and his clients are always assumed to be guilty before he even opens his bluffing mouth.

scrawlers

Gentle reminder that the Ace Attorney series was created to be a critical satire of the Japanese criminal justice system, wherein you are guilty until proven innocent and the conviction rate is 99%. While obviously a lot of the nonsense is exaggerated (e.g. prosecutors in Japan aren’t going to be able to whip people, much less the judge, just for pissing them off), the heavy bias against the defendant, heavy bias in favor of the prosecution, and other aspects of the series such as that do reflect the state of things in Japan. Of course it makes less sense from a western standpoint (as noted above), but although these games have been localized, they were still written by a Japanese person for a Japanese audience first and foremost. Cultural context is always important to remember.