Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Does God take an interest in criminal justice and human rights?

If He, She, or They did, would there even be a reason to write about criminal justice and human rights?

A bit more than a week ago, The Atlantic magazine asked a question like that: “Did God Save Donald Trump?” An unsurprising number of people believe God did just that. That it wasn’t that the registered Republican who tried to kill him had voted more times in his young life than he had pulled the trigger of the weapon he chose. No, “it was God and God alone,” said the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, God who Personally spared the convicted felon and sexual abuser and somehow overlooked the family man with the clean record.

Me, I haven’t listened to a Southern Baptist since the ones who told my pre-adolescent brother and me that if we didn’t baptize into the faith we’d burn in hell like our mother who only weeks before converted to Catholicism on her death bed (and me, I took the paved road).

Is it lack of divine interest that accounts for laws that now prohibit Afghan women from speaking in public, from singing or reading aloud even in their own homes, from exposing any part of their bodies, even faces, in public lest they lead the apparently helplessly weak Taliban men unto temptation?

Is it for lack of divine interest that children hunger, that people slaughter each other, abase each other?

On the day that Donald Trump was shot at, one hundred seventy thousand seven hundred ninety-one people died, virtually every one of them dear to someone.

To suggest that God would let every one of those dear ones go, and not that man, not that man, is to seriously undervalue whatever god you do or do not believe in.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I was rather stunned to see this from the former president of the United States:

He posted it on his Truth Social platform. So I dug around the internet to see if he had written anything else about this new leaf he seems to have turned over, and found this:

I don’t know. Seems heartfelt. Think there’s still hope for this guy?

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Thursday’s was likely the most pathetic debate between two candidates for the office of president in the history of the republic. Call it the Gumfight at the Not O.K. Corral. The Felon versus The Melon.

This was supposed to be the debate that would save our democracy, that would prevent one of these guys from eluding justice after engaging in an insurrection and conspiracy to overthrow his own government.

Two very old white men who seemed most energized about who could hit a golf ball farther. It was as though just before the debate they had stood face to face, teed off and hit each other in the forehead.

One of them shamelessly lied time and time and maybe thirty times again, with such conviction that I almost believed he believed his lies; the other I wasn’t sure could have told me the time.

The liar had previously been investigated and convicted or adjudicated of thirty-four felonies for falsifying business records and for election and tax fraud to hide a not quite two-minute sex act with a woman who was not his pregnant wife; of sexual abuse which a judge said was in most states rape; of slander against the woman he raped; of business fraud for which he’s been ordered to pay almost half a billion dollars. Many, many other felony indictments are pending trial for such things as conspiracy to overthrow the election he embarrassingly lost, and theft of state secrets he embarrassingly kept by his toilet.

The other president up there was likewise investigated for years by Republican congressional committees and a Republican special counsel who concluded he was a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory, but for some reason declined to indict him for that.

One of those men didn’t belong on the same stage with the other, but hey, that’s American politics these days.

The one who did deserve to own that stage might have fared better in the debate a few years ago, but he didn’t fare better Thursday night, and his age was appallingly evident. Even the nearly as old criminal who debated him seemed taken aback.

At the end of it, the First Lady of the United States held the hand of the President of the United States to help him negotiate — sideways — the couple of steps to the safety of the next flat surface.

At what was meant to be a celebration afterwards, she said to him, “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question.” In the manner of a pre-school teacher to a toddler.

The crowd, who must have seen a different debate than the rest of us, burst deliriously into “Four More Years! Four More Years! Four More Years!”

Four more years?

To save our democracy, to save a justice system founded in the idea that no one is above the law, first this guy’s gotta somehow get through four more months.

Best luck to him, to the rest of us.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

We’re just gonna have to come up with a new name for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Because of recent “Supreme” court action, and inaction, women and girls are dying in this country, denied health care that could save their lives.

A fake macho ex-president, who was declared ineligible for political office by my state’s Supreme Court because he engaged in insurrection against his country, is being protected by its “Supreme” court against federal prosecution, so he can do it again.

Our “Supreme” court, which follows no ethical rule required for every other court beneath it, yet has no end of its own ethical challenges, decided only yesterday that state officials, much like several of the court’s justices, may accept financial rewards for jobs well done, so long as they don’t ask for them in advance, which of course would be a bribe. These folks prefer to think of it as a tip, like you’d give a waiter for good service. It’s not a bribe for a government contract, see, it’s a tip. Keep those tips coming.

Since the time I was born, we’ve always cloaked the justices in dark robes from neck to toe. There’s a reason they are cloaked, and there’s a reason why they are dark.

They’re just naked under there.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Supposedly that’s the advice Louisiana Senator John Kennedy gave Texas Senator Ted Cruz when asked how best metaphorically to kiss the ring of disgraced President Donald Trump.

Louisiana does things differently. It’s the only state in the union that bases its civil code on French law instead of English common law. Now it’s the only state in the union to require that every public classroom display the Ten Commandments. Not just one classroom, or a few, in every state elementary school, middle school, high school, charter school, college and university. Every classroom.

Governor Napoleon Landry signed the new legislation into law, declaring “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Charlton Heston.” (I may have mangled the quote slightly.) It wasn’t immediately clear if people like the former president would still be welcome in the state.

“I can’t wait to be sued,” the governor crowed. He had to wait but five days.

Though Landry wasn’t personally sued (no stupidity statute in Napoleonic Code), the ACLU obliged with a lawsuit filed today.

No one who has ever been to law school, and almost everyone who hasn’t been, believes a law that elevates one Protestant faith above all other faiths, above all other believers and nonbelievers, is anything but an insult to the founding document of the United States of America.

Meanwhile, no word yet on whether all Louisiana public school cafeterias will have to likewise display the commandments, with an eleventh locational proviso:

“Thou Shalt Not Start Food Fights.”