Land of good-guy prosecutors.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: TV portrayals of defense attorneys

My son just finished law school and passed the bar. By all rights, I should be strutting around the neighborhood, regaling friends and strangers with proud tales of "my son, the lawyer." Guess again. You see, my son is a public defender. In his office, the staff attorneys wear buttons that read, "Don't tell my mother I'm a public defender; she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse."

I've come to understand such black humor very well. The attitude of most Americans toward defense attorneys is not good. "An eye for an eye" resonates deeply with public emotion these days. "The presumption of innocence," so dear to the hearts of the Founding Fathers, seems harder and harder for people to grasp. Clarence Darrow, much less Bill Kunstler, would have as bleak a chance of getting elected to public office in the current climate as Charles Manson.

The media have a lot to do with this. TV bombards us daily with images of slick defense attorneys using their wily ways to bamboozle unsuspecting jurors into letting "obviously guilty" persons - the Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt - go free. Never mind that in real life, where the Court TV cameras don't go, nine out of ten cases that actually go to trial result in convictions and imprisonment. Why else would our prisons be bursting at the seams, as the prison industry itself becomes big business? But forget common sense and hard figures. To the public, glued to the TV, things are clearly otherwise. Criminals are everywhere going free to rob and plunder, while their lying, scheming, amoral attorneys grow richer by the minute.

But it's not only - or even primarily - through Court TV and CNN that the media work to befuddle us about the true nature of the criminal-justice system, and whose interests it does and doesn't serve. It's actually fictional programs that give TV audiences the most dramatically distorted images of American law and lawyers.

Virtually every courtroom drama presents the most stereotypical images of defense attorneys and their clients. The lawyers are willing to say or do anything to get their invariably despicable clients off, while the prosecutors - usually cast regulars to whom we have developed a loyalty - are harried, overworked good guys trying valiantly, against super odds, to keep the streets safe for us upscale viewers of quality television."

It was not always thus. The tradition of TV courtroom drama in America has been in the liberal, Frank Capra-mode. It used to be that the little guy, falsely accused, was proven innocent by a heroic lawyer modeled after Clarence Darrow.

Raymond Burr, first as Perry Mason and then as Ironsides, still shows up in reruns. These are dated, to be sure. But they are worth looking at on occasion to get a sense of how...