I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A really kind Texas gal wrote to give me one last chance to pay attention to a message she’s been trying to get out that she thinks could potentially save lives.
A message that could save lives is probably the kind of thing I should pay attention to.
It’s a guide to Good Samaritan laws, which exist in every state, but I’d bet a bitcoin buck not that many people know about them, and almost certainly not how they work. Main point is, that if you take the trouble to help someone in an emergency, and something goes wrong, you can’t be sued or jailed for trying to do the right thing.
Claudia Reynolds, outreach coordinator for Stages of Recovery, is particularly interested in how these laws can reduce drug overdose deaths by letting users or their friends and family know they can call for help without fear of legal peril.
She says during the first year of COVID-19, drug overdose deaths rose thirty percent, to more than ninety thousand. Knowledge of Good Sam law safeguards, she says, could have saved fourteen thousand lives.
Fourteen thousand. I apologize for not paying better attention.
The article she says can help us all pay better attention, is here.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, should be charged with crimes against humanity, a congressional panel there says.
They say the big B — and if you read “Bastard” into that it’s all right with me — intentionally let hundreds of thousands of his people die of coronavirus so that his economy and political future might live. His big idea was that if enough people less privileged got the virus, died of it, the more privileged might achieve herd immunity and survive to make more money than ever.
That sound like any other President you know?
Sounds like one Deborah Birx used to avert her eyes from. The former White House coronavirus task force coordinator has secretly told a House committee that had mask-wearing, social distancing, and other efforts (like testing and vaccines) she begged her own fat bastard to promote, instead of hydroxychloroquine, bleach injections, and “herd mentality,” as many as one hundred sixty thousand lives could probably have been saved.
Where is our own congressional panel urging our own indictments for these recklessly lost lives?
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Cheering news for family who watched seven of their kids blow up in the parting U.S. drone strike on Kabul on the last Sunday of August: they get free trips to see where the bombs were made.
The Pentagon is working with the State Department to print tickets for these lucky winners. Survivors of dead kids get to relocate to one of our states that don’t mind Afghan people wandering their streets.
Hard to imagine anyone not wanting to make a new life in the wonderful country that mistakenly murdered their children.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A former Nazi concentration camp guard is set to start trial in Germany within the next couple weeks, charged as accessory to the murder of three thousand, five hundred eighteen persons. He’s one hundred years old.
A medical assessment says the man, whose identity is kindly protected by German privacy law, can bear no more than two and a half hours a day in the courtroom. The witnesses against him say they’re not sure they can bear more than five minutes in a room with him.
Some people ask what purpose can it serve to prosecute so old and frail a person, even for so heinous a crime.
Efraim Zuroff has a few ideas about that. He’s spent more than forty years tracking down men and women who committed their crimes before he was born. He’s found more than three thousand of them, living under new identities in twenty countries. He’s been called the last Nazi hunter. He still hunts.
The passage of time, he says, makes these criminals no less guilty, these victims and their families no less harmed.
The trials make it hard to distort or deny the Holocaust, when real — if only barely live — Nazis animate the evidence.
Zuroff says Nazi war criminals are the last people on earth who deserve any sympathy: not a single one he has found has ever expressed regret or remorse for the people they helped bring to their final solution.
He expects the same will be true when the hundred-year-old man is convicted and sentenced as accessory to mass murder.
The last such prison sentence was five to fifteen years in prison.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
U.S. presidents tend to disappoint you, even the ones who don’t dye their hair the color of a creamsicle.
President Obama said he’d close Guantamo on Day One, and that torture garden is still in business.
One president’s failure is another’s aspiration. The next guy ordered it remain open indefinitely. Probably meant to put his first presidential opponent there, and his second after the reinstatement that was supposed to happen a couple weeks ago (hand it to those QAnon kids: as Frank used to say, they’ve got high hopes).
Now, President Biden declared, come hell or high water — mostly hell — we had to get out of Afghanistan by end of business tomorrow.
[Perversely, he beat that already rushed and plan-free deadline as I was writing this: the last Globemaster military transport sneaked out at midnight Kabul time, leaving one hundred thousand and more people we promised to protect to the protection instead of people who despise and hate them.]
Never mind two decades of U.S. assurances to Afghans that if they worked with us, “we will have your backs” (they see only our backs now). Never mind the tens of thousands who’ve died apparently for nothing doing that work, the tens of thousands more of the abandoned who will die. Never mind the burgeoning human rights disaster that faces those who will live under Taliban rule.
There are fourteen million women and girls in Afghanistan. Approximately fourteen million of them will see their lives abruptly degraded again.
The Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini (“The Kite Runner”) had said we could not allow the people we have been calling “our partners” for twenty years to be murdered, to “be imprisoned, to be beaten and tortured and persecuted now that we have left. We have a moral obligation to follow through.”
But the last time someone suggested we had a moral obligation to the Afghans, Joe Biden said “Fuck that. We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
And now this president hopes to get away with it, with his own bungled exit, counting on a changed Taliban. He says he doesn’t trust the Taliban, yet to the Taliban he has entrusted Afghan rule and lives (even offering up a list of Afghans to evacuate — in Taliban hands now likely a death list).
We are the new Taliban, the old Taliban assured him, and things will be different — better — now.
Earlier this month, militants of the different and better Taliban 2.0 murdered an Afghan woman, murdered her for cause: her clothes were deemed tight-fitting and she brazenly wandered the town unescorted by a male relative.
