I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
In the spirit of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion, I’m going to leak a (probably) final draft opinion of my own:
I believe that life begins at conception. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, that’s when we get going. Sometimes we don’t make it very far. Sometimes we make the news by blowing out one hundred candles.
Some of us never make it out of the womb, for any number of reasons; abortion is one. That’s the space Justice Alito wants to control.
That’s not his space. That’s not my space. That’s the space every woman owns. That’s her space.
Justice Alito’s opinion, my opinion, your opinion, have no fair and just legal business in her space until the human being growing inside her has reached viability such that they could grow as well outside her, into our space.
Yes, Justice Alito, the Constitution makes no mention of abortion. The Constitution also makes no mention of the women we are going to kill or otherwise make suffer with our opinions.
Wa-Tho-Huk (“Bright Path”), better known to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School by his English name. He would be played, in a movie about his life, by an Irish-American guy named Burt.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I don’t remember when I first heard the expression, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. I know I was very young. It’s a rotten thing to utter into a young ear — a national shame among a multitude of national shames committed against the original caretakers of the land we call home.
The extent of another of those shames was revealed today as a direct result of Joe Biden’s appointment of the first Native American to be Secretary of the Interior, the first Native American to be appointed to any cabinet post. Barely three months after her Senate confirmation, Deb Haaland ordered an investigation into what essentially were decades of government kidnappings of hundreds of thousands of Native American children into federal boarding schools whose aim was figuratively and ofttimes literally to beat the Indian out of them. Haaland’s own grandparents were among them.
The forced removals came after the United States Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 to instruct Indian children about the “habits and arts of civilization.” We wanted to civilize the savages. Make them more like white men and women.
Many of them were civilized into their graves.
This first Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report reveals that the schools accounted for more than five hundred American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian child deaths. Beyond the deaths, children were flogged, whipped, slapped, and cuffed; starved; used as forced labor; punished for “Indian behavior.” Their Indian names were changed, their Indian hair cut.
The Department of the Interior “expects the number of recorded deaths to increase.” And why might they expect that? Their initial analysis was of nineteen federal Indian boarding schools.
There were four hundred eight schools.
Their final analysis, the department predicts, will show tens of thousands died in the federal Indian boarding schools.
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.”
