I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
This particular human rights investigation, released today, was of a police department where almost two years ago one of its white officers nonchalantly kneeled on a black man’s neck and held George Floyd there until he was dead.
This particular report showed:
Police routinely use higher rates of more severe force against black people than white people in similar circumstances.
Police are more likely to stop vehicles when they see people of color, or indigenous people, in them.
Those people are treated differently than white people are in similar circumstances. More likely to be searched, more likely to be cited, held longer, treated violently, taken to jail.
Police are overaggressive and undertrained.
Police are far more likely to use deadly force against darker skin.
These particular findings were in Minneapolis. I wish I could say all this is shocking.
Truth is — look around you — in many cases in the United States, this could be your city.
Your city nonchalantly kneeling on somebody’s neck.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
When I was a wee lad, the first law firm of which I became aware was called Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe. I think they handled some sort of domestic violence dustup between Porky and Petunia Pig. Maybe Petunia hit Porky in the face with a cream pie; I don’t firmly remember the details.
The important thing was the name of the law firm: some names just go together, like a horse and carriage.
My first law firm was Rosmarin & Milner. Not nearly so interesting a name. It didn’t last. Not because our names were so boring, but because Richie and I were only thirteen and no state supreme courts were handing out law licenses to folks not quite out of the eighth grade with imaginative ambitions.
Since I started writing the Drunk & Disorderly newsletter, I’ve come across some names that are interesting. I’ve come across them because, as sixty thousand or so of you across the world know, subscription to the newsletter is by invitation, and acceptance of that invitation, only. (Full disclosure: the first two hundred forty-one of you who got the very first edition were simply and literally enlisted on the untested theory that you were friends, family, and colleagues I already knew well and so you wouldn’t mind, and for the most part you didn’t. Apologies to that one guy who did.)
None of the lawyers mentioned here are subscribers; while many of you have interesting — some would say fascinating — names, the subscriber list is confidential, strictly off the record.
“I get results with Payne & Fears,” reads one testimonial on that Irvine, California, LLP’s website. It could have been, but I don’t think it was, written by Vladimir Putin.
There was the husband and wife law firm of Bickers & Bickers in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. I see they’ve retired, but you can still write to attybickers@windstream.net and probably still get an argument from them.
I might mention that Boone, North Carolina, boasts the law firm of Eggers, Eggers, Eggers, & Eggers, but I wouldn’t want to encourage them. Though what of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow? There must be a few little eager Eggers among them who can’t wait to add their names to the letterhead.
But by far the most interesting name of a real law firm which I have ever encountered is the one I stumbled upon today in The Netherlands.
They are Freeke & Monster, attorneys at law, who as you can see from the photo above that greets you on their website, are not nearly so scary. When you translate from the Dutch there, they actually sound pretty darn nice.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The prosecutor who wrote the 1977 death penalty initiative which remains the law by which California still permanently silences its worst behaved citizens has passionately labored the past ten years to undo his work.
Over the course of thirty-five years, Donald Heller went from certainty of the rightness of capital punishment, to absolute certainty that capital punishment is wrong because no moral society should risk executing an innocent person.
He wrote to me today to remind me why. He told me he still thinks he said it best, in a short piece he published a decade ago. Called “From Certainty, Change,” his original title was “It Doesn’t Fucking Work.”
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I’ve been getting letters from a lawyer named Jeff Grant for some time now.
Jeff Grant was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1982. Twenty years later, he was disbarred. Like many lawyers, he loved the good life. Like many lawyers, he loved it too much. He cheated clients, he cheated the government, to support the good life. He lost his practice, his marriage, his freedom — nearly lost his life.
After prison, he literally got religion. He became a minister, and formed a prison ministry.
It’s the prison ministry that got me interested in his letters.
Grant, three years newly married, founded with his wife Progressive Prison Ministries some ten years ago. He calls it “the world’s first ministry devoted to serving the white collar justice community.” He particularly works with people who committed the same kinds of crimes he did, who feel the same kind of shame, remorse, and deep regret he says he did. He wants to help them walk, with him, a different path, “to learn and evolve into a new spiritual way of life and to reach out in service to others.”
Ten or eleven months ago, Jeff Grant got his law license back, and he’s using it to give himself a second chance, but more importantly, to give a bunch of other people second chances, in court. Other people whose dilemmas he understands fairly well, because he was one of them.
That’s sort of his motto, according to a recent email I got from him. “It Takes One To Know One,” was the subject line.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Criminal defense lawyer Jerome Greco, who works for The Legal Aid Society in New York City, recently wrote to tell me about a newsletter the Digital Forensics Unit he supervises publishes each month. Because in just a few days they’ll post the next edition of Decrypting a Defense, it seems a good time to tell you about it.
The title itself needs a little decrypting, as does at least one of the articles in this month’s edition, about ShotSpotter evidence.
ShotSpotter. I always thought a ShotSpotter was someone who could find the next drink on the bar. The actual evidence shows I may have been wrong about that.
The newsletter explores the intersection of technology and criminal justice; the unit that publishes it, its website says, was created in 2013 in recognition of the growing use of digital evidence in the criminal justice system.
Things like a controversial facial recognition service the NYPD uses. Aerial surveillance that violates the Fourth Amendment. And serving subpoenas on Facebook.
Oh, and ShotSpotter? Nothing to do with grabbing my next drink. But you can see for yourself, here.
