I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Society is incentivizing criminals to commit more crimes through implementing soft-on-crime policies.
That’s from an article in National Review that ran just three months ago. It suggests the way to crack down on crime is to send more criminals to prison for longer terms.
Iain Smith is a criminal defense lawyer who writes from Scotland to remind me that being hard or soft on crime is a distraction from a focus on the trauma that leads some people to commit crime. Adverse childhood experiences frequently set an intersecting path with the criminal justice system, as Smith described here last year with an empath’s touch. The year before, he had been named Scottish Lawyer of the Year.
Recently Scottish sentencing law has responded to some of those ideas, as reflected in new guidelines for the sentencing of persons younger than twenty-five years.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I can’t remember how many times I’ve been asked by folks accused of crime, who can’t afford to hire a lawyer, whether public defenders are lawyers like the rest of us.
They are not lawyers like the rest of us: they are in court every day, they work harder than we do, and more of them became lawyers because they believe the poorest people deserve competent representation every bit as much as the richer people who pay us. But that’s a story for another day.
This story is about members of the United States Senate who appear to believe public defenders should not be appointed federal judges because they spend too much time defending people the government accuses of crime. In other words, they spend too much time defending the Constitution of the United States of America.
I suppose that’s understandable, because these particular senators spend very little time defending that document. In fact, Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz spent much of their time on and around 6 January 2021 betraying it.
Both those half-full intellects (Yale and Harvard want their law degrees back) oppose the nomination of Arianna Freeman to the federal bench because she’s spent her career at the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia.
The junior senator from Missouri, during Freeman’s confirmation hearing (now essentially on hold), complained she had the gall to “intervene” in the execution of a man who, as a teenager, murdered two men who had sexually abused him. In both cases prosecutors withheld evidence to get convictions, including of self-defense and of the sexual abuse, which jurors said had they known of it they would not have voted for the death penalty. “You argued for years,” Hawley whined, “that he shouldn’t be actually executed.” True, Freeman conceded, because he shouldn’t have been actually executed.
The politically cuckolded junior senator from Texas cast shade on where Freeman wanted to sit in the courtroom. “You could have been a prosecutor,” Cruz said, as though that were somehow loftier than a defender. “You didn’t want to be a prosecutor. You wanted to stand with the criminals.”
People who stand with the criminals — criminal defense lawyers — shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the federal judiciary, he said.
Begging the question whether lawyers like these should be allowed to serve in the Congress.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I owe my name to Queen Elizabeth.
Had I been born a girl this blog and the newsletter that points to it would have been written by Elizabeth Rosmarin. Maybe I would have snazzied it up a bit and said it was by Lilibet Rosmarin. But I was born a boy.
A very lucky boy. Lucky, first, that I got out of Los Angeles’s South Hoover Hospital at all, carried in my sharp-eyed protective mama’s arms to my first home just fifteen blocks up the street from there. Other mamas may not have been so sharp-eyed, according to lawsuits filed against the hospital and Mo Pilson, the doctor who took me from her womb. Some of the mamas who lay in South Hoover’s thirty-five beds said they were sent home with the wrong baby, in one case a girl who started out as a boy. One blamed him for the stillbirth of her child, saying she was strapped down over the two days she was in labor and that the cesarean was so botched an orderly told her “They have done a mess with you.” The Supreme Court of California said it “may well have been a meritorious claim,” but agreed with clever Doc Pilson that even if he did do it, that mama filed her lawsuit just a little bit outside the statute of limitations. Her sorrow, said the high court, was “the price of the orderly and timely processing of litigation.”
The second reason I was luckier than that woman’s baby, is that before Queen Elizabeth’s marriage, she had dallied with the Seventh Earl of Carnarvon, whose courtesy title was Lord Porchester, and whom she affectionately called “Porchey.”
As it was, Lilibet married Philip Mountbatten, and that was the story that headlined the newspaper lying in her hospital room when absent-minded Doc Pilson asked my mama, what did you say you gonna name that boy?
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
This is a letter from myself. Written from a skipping stone’s throw of Skaneateles Lake in upstate New York. It’s the easternmost of that state’s Finger Lakes (apparently named after someone with a surplus digit).
It’s a good place to jump into after a set of tennis, a volleyball match with folks still learning to volley the ball, or reading about the latest grift our most recent ex-president has been up to.
It’s where I’ve been all month, and nearly every summer since I met the woman who took this picture. Its water is so calming it might have been named Lake Serenity, revivifyingly cool, and as clear as the antique crystal you’ll find in most of the homes around here.
She finds much more in it than I do — she’s been coming here all her life — and her photo, one of dozens she took of the water this summer, has saved us far more than a thousand words of my poor description.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Brian Owsley is a constitutional law professor with a background in human rights lawyering who first graced these pages last October.
He wrote today to tell me he’s been busy, but not too busy to look into the Don of Mar-a-Lago’s baby-man-whining about the FBI raiding “my beautiful home.” (That’s my characterization, not Professor Owsley’s, who I may have mentioned before is a way nicer man than I).
A former United States magistrate judge who himself signed countless search warrants, Owsley says while the search and seizure may have been shocking to the Orange McMuffin (me again; can’t help myself) and his toadies (yup), it was also something that the big boy never seemed to concern himself with much before: it was constitutional.
He wrote about it, in much gentler language, for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News.
