That is highly contextual. A coworker of mine called that the "Physician <-> Prostitute Spectrum." Certain service providers will pretty much do whatever you pay them to. Other service providers will filter their request through their expert knowledge. This also depends on the nature of the request, of course. It's not like a Doctor is going to give you a sex change you didn't ask for, if things are working correctly.

Whether to plead guilty should be up to the client, unless they aren't competent.

A better analogy would be going to a prostitute and insisting on a condom, but then the prostitute pokes some holes in it and becomes pregnant "because you seemed lonely so I thought a child might be best for you". That would be a case of requesting one service (protected sex not resulting in pregnancy) but getting an undesirable one (unprotected sex resulting in pregnancy) solely because the service professional disagreed with "what's in the best interest of the client in the view of the [prostitute]". Which, to put it mildly, is not what you paid for. :-)

If a hired professional disagrees with a course of action that a customer has explicitly requested, the appropriate action is to decline to enter into a professional services arrangement, or break an existing one. Not just go ahead with whatever you wanted to do anyway because you think its better.

Not a better analogy. The same analogy. It's a counterpart to the unwanted sex change from the Doctor. (From what I've read, it's certain that an unasked for sex change was performed by some doctors on some infants.)

> State psychiatric experts found McCoy mentally competent to stand trial.

> McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity

> people who represent themselves in major criminal trials often have enormous mental health problems and imperception of reality.

It is a very, very high bar these days in order to be found mentally incompetent, and as there is no social safety net, the mentally incompetent are disproportionately prosecuted via the legal system.

This seems more like the court thought he was fine and the lawyer decided the guy was mentally incompetent himself, which, given the article lists several other mistakes the lawyer apparently made, this sounds like he just was kind of a crappy/lazy lawyer.

In case anyone thinks I'm not considering the difficulties faced by overworked public defenders, I here ya, but the lawyer that screwed all this up was retained by his parents.

> He briefly acted as his own lawyer until his parents hired Larry English to defend him, and even then, the defendant continued to file motions in his own defense. English repeatedly advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, but McCoy repeatedly refused, insisting that he was innocent. Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt, in hopes of avoiding the death penalty."

Right, but it sounds like a big part of the problem here is that the bar is set very high here, perhaps more than is reasonable.