History AssholeVictim / AceAttorney

* The first case's victim, Shadi Smith, is a bit of a complicated case, as his real identity (and the motive of his murderer) isn't clear until the very end. However, even before that it's made known that he was trying to rig a game of cards against the defendant, and when the plan failed he [[GrievousBottleyHarm clocked his co-conspirator over the head with a bottle of grape juice]].

* The second case's victim, Turner Grey, was a real DrJerk who overworked his nurse Mimi Miney to the point of exhaustion, causing her to both accidentally mix up medications, which led to several patients dying, and falling asleep at the wheel while driving and crash her car, which gave her horrible facial disfigurement and killed her younger sister Ini -- in an attempt to start over, she gave the doctors who would reconstruct her face a picture Ini, and she lived as her sister from then on. Being one of the few victims we meet before their demise, his {{jerkass}} persona is well-evident. While Phoenix claims that [[JerkassHasAPoint Grey was right about Mimi being the one who (unintentionally) killed the patients,]] Grey not only makes it clear that he only cares about his reputation, but the fact that he brought a revolver (which private citizens can't legally possess in Japan) to the ceremony to channel Mimi makes one wonder how far he was planning to go to force her to take the blame so people would stop pinning the deaths on him.

* Well, William Shamspeare isn’t ''dead,'' but he was the victim of attempted murder, so he still counts. In order to get his hands on an expensive treasure, he killed Duncan Ross and attempted to kill Sōseki. While the first one was accidental, as you can by the “attempted” part of “attempted to kill,” the second was certainly not.

* [[BigBad Dahlia Hawthorne herself.]] After spending two cases screwing over everyone- killing two people herself, manipulating her boyfriend into being DrivenToSuicide, and trying to kill Diego Armando and Phoenix Wright(resulting in the former going into a coma)- she ends up getting executed. Then she comes back from the dead to kill Maya, only for Godot to stab her, meaning she is the actual victim of his crime and technically died twice. Unfortunately, she just was channeled by the innocent Misty, who was killed with her.

* Most of Redd White's vast fortune comes from blackmailing the hell out of various {{Corrupt Politician}}s, {{Corrupt Corporate Executive}}s, {{Dirty Cop}}s, and the like. Many of whom eventually opted to [[DrivenToSuicide commit suicide]] rather than have their dirty deeds exposed or keep shelling out the cash to keep them under wraps. For example, Marvin Grossberg leaked information on his client Misty Fey to White for money, and when White leaked this information, Misty had to leave Khurain village out of shame. When the police suspected someone leaked the information, White blackmailed Grossberg. Of course, this doesn't make White any more sympathetic, since [[EvilVersusEvil he's at least as bad as most of the people he blackmails]].

* The phantom may have survived getting sniped during his VillainousBreakdown, but it’s still nigh impossible to feel sorry for him considering this is the man who had two of the Cosmos Space Center’s key staff murdered, emotionally traumatized the daughter of one of them, turned the best friend of the other against his co-workers, had an innocent prosecutor take the fall for his crimes, and impersonated a deceased police detective for a year, and that’s only the crimes we see in-game.

* The final victim, Drew Misham, is a played-with case. He's personally quite affable and a loving father to his daughter Vera, but the fact remains that he was a forger and it was evidence he forged that led to Phoenix losing his badge (admittedly, Vera was the one who was making the forgeries, but Drew got the idea and took on the clients). He deeply regrets Phoenix getting disbarred, but sees no other way to provide for Vera other than forging... which unfortunately leads to his own death and ''almost'' gets Vera killed when one of his clients poisons him so he can't reveal the scheme to disgrace Phoenix.

* The first victim of the second game is Jezaille Brett, who, similar to Horace Knightley above, was the first murderer of the first game and got away with it due to DiplomaticImpunity. In addition to being, well, ''a murderer,'' she was also extremely racist, so much so it’s what lead to her death, and tried to frame Naruhodō for the murder of John H Wilson. She got away with her crime even when caught and wasted no time gloating about it to her killer, who would be completely justified if he never framed someone who was not an asshole. It’s later learned; in the last two cases of the second game; that, one, her real name is Asa Shinn, and two, [[PunnyName as her name suggests]], she is an assassin. Specifically, the main assassin behind the Reaper killings, which killed almost every defendant Barok van Zieks prosecuted that got a Not Guilty verdict, resulting in 16 deaths. While we know for a fact that some of them were definitely guilty, we don’t if all of them were, so it’s likely that she murdered innocent people who had the bad luck of simply being ''prosecuted'' by van Zieks. And unlike Gregson, we don’t know her reasons for doing this, so she ''may'' have had the same motivations as Gregson, or she may not have.

** Holland ends up being murdered during Bird Wing's final concert. While all of the band members hated each other by the time the band broke up, Holland's decision to ditch the band to earn more money as a solo act resulted in him bein the least sympathetic.

* Juan Corrida of the fourth case initially seems like a nice guy, but it becomes increasingly evident that the feud between himself and Matt Engarde was an ugly reflection on both of them, and often wound up with other people in the crosshairs: most notably, when Juan found out his fiancee Celeste had once been an item with Matt, he called off their wedding and Celeste committed suicide. Her protege, Adrian Andrews, blamed them both for her mentor's death. Juan himself, on the other hand, forged the suicide note of Celeste to frame only the other culprit, Matt, just to spite him. His rival just was [[EvilerThanThou even more ruthless.]]

* The ''Anime/AceAttorney'' anime has an anime-exclusive episode, ''Northward Turnabout Express'', in which Avery Richman, a foreign millionaire sentenced to death for the murder of a U.S.[[note]]The Ace Attorney anime takes place in Japan, even in the localization[[/note]] official, takes a train hostage in order to force a retrial. It eventually turns out that an assassin by the name of Gale Gaelic had been hired to kill the official and frame Richman for that. When Gaelic tries to blackmail Tristan Turnbull, the prosecutor responsible for Richman's conviction, Turnbull kills Gaelic.