Fay Spence is a former federal public defender who cares deeply about the law, and about the people the law tries hard to crush. She’s been crushing back for more than thirty years. She wrote last month to tell me about a piece she’d published with three colleagues in The Federal Lawyer.
It’s about medical care (“such as it is,” she writes) in the federal Bureau of Prisons.
“Prisoners have a constitutional right to adequate medical care,” the article begins, “but what that means and how to get needed treatment are often not well understood by attorneys representing criminal defendants.”
She and her colleagues try hard to repair that misfortune.
Her article arrived in plenty of time for the April edition of Drunk & Disorderly, but unfortunately looking for that particular edition has sometimes proved, over the years, a fool’s errand.
Fortunately, though, we’re now into May, and so, at last, it’s here.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
You would have heard the shots from our backyard.
The hunter who stalked our supermarket last week in my home town, Boulder, favored a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol.
I call him a hunter out of my deep and abiding respect for the NRA, which says we need this type of weapon to preserve our right to hunt game without too much trouble, and has hired a ton of United States Congress members to help.
The pistol lets you take thirty shots in one go. Everybody knows the credo of the deer hunter: one shot. The whole neighborhood could bag its limit with one magazine before hunting season wiped the sleep from its eyes.
It let him take the lives of ten of our neighbors in almost no time at all.
You can fire thirty shots quicker than you can read this sentence, perfect for the hunter with a tiny vacation window.
Sure, yeah, these guns are for hunting, the NRA likes to tell us. Or for home protection (I keep one under my pillow; don’t sleep much, and my wife wishes I weren’t right-handed, so I could point it the other way). That people get massacred is unfortunate collateral damage. We need them for hunting. It’s worth it.
There’s a promotional video for this gun. It’s the affordable weapon of mass destruction, about the cost of an iPhone. It’s good to go right out of the box, so a guy who buys it six days before he wants to kill as many people as he can is good to go, too. It can make ragged holes at a hundred yards. We don’t have to imagine what it can do at a few feet.
It can make ragged holes, too, in the fabric of our society.
As soon as people learned the shooter had so many vowels in his name he had to be Muslim, Facebook blew up.
Lots of people railed that the gunman probably wasn’t even a citizen, had sneaked across the border like all the other murdering immigrants. Americans would much rather be murdered by other Americans.
Lots of others said what can you expect from a Muslim.
This is Obama’s America, they said; Biden’s fault. A full-throated defense of all the white supremacists who didn’t do this.
There was a lot of talk about butt rape.
No question this murdering bastard should face the full weight of justice.
But when you write hate like this, when you Tweet bile, when you allow weapons of war on our streets, in our homes, in our schools, at our jobs, in our churches, in our movie theaters, in our hotels, in our nightclubs, in our spas, in our groceries, you are planting seeds.
Someday those seeds may sprout, in your backyard.
Thing is, we don’t have to keep sowing these same seeds, season after season, reaping this same crop, gun massacre after gun massacre.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
My big brother Don died the other day. He’s the first of us to go, so I’m not used to it yet.
I almost never called him Don. Maybe because I only really knew him when I was a child, maybe because there were seven years between us, maybe because the criminal who was my father kicked him out of our house when I was thirteen, but I nearly always called him as a child would. I called my big brother, Donnie.
Though my childhood hero who protected our dying mother from the coward she married, I barely knew him as a man. Our times together as adults were always good times, but rare times.
He was a gifted dancer, who married another gifted dancer.
They created a passel of kids, who created a passel of other kids, who are creating a passel more. All the kids who knew him loved him, and will tell stories to the kids who never knew him who will then love him too. Life after life. Everlasting.
I told my own story about Donnie many years ago when I was at university, in a tale about the death of our mother.
I recalled a heavily wooded park our family used to go to, where Donnie would run the cobweb paths and hide, and I could never find him. Because I could never find him, they were his secret paths. When she was very sick, my mother sought to give me hope, and promised to recover and show me where they were, but she died.
In the story, I remembered that a few days afterward I stood in my mother’s kitchen washing dishes, humming a tune mindlessly and pleasantly until I realized the lyrics I had been singing over and over to myself, but had not heard, were the words, may we always be together.
I put away the last dish, left our house, and walked by myself to the park, where I sat on a fallen tree and tried to remember all I could of my mother, but my grief was too great. I imagined that if I looked through the trees and squinted my eyes hard enough I might see her. But instead it was my brother Donnie I saw, and I heard him laugh and watched him duck through the path I could never find.
In the story he was gone from me again, and I shouted at the trees that hid my brother’s path and I knew I wouldn’t find it but I raised my body in a child’s determination to follow him anyway, and ran the wooded paths alone.
At least that was how it was in the story.
I didn’t quite catch which secret path Donnie went down this time either.
But I’m guessing I’ll go down that path myself, alone, one other day.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
There is good news this month. There is.
Abigail Henson, an assistant professor of criminology, wrote from Phoenix to let me know about a podcast (“Critical Conversations”) she started a few months ago with no less an aim than to transform the criminal justice system.
Her conversations, with folks directly impacted by the system, might just transform you. The episodes are bite-size, most less than an hour each, and are here.
Another newsletter writer with an interest in criminal justice, Professor of Biology Nathan Lents wrote from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York to share an article he co-authored with colleague Lila Kazemian. It tells us what biology (and other animals on this planet) can teach us about crime and justice.
From London, Kingston University Senior Lecturer Peter Finn, who directs traffic at the intersection of national security and human rights, wrote this month to tell me of the series he hosts called “The Covid-19 and Democracy Podcast.” He thought readers of Drunk & Disorderly might particularly be interested in the episode about the English and Welsh criminal justice systems to which you can listen here.
Finally, there was a letter from the State of Virginia that felt like an undiscovered Christmas gift.
It brought the news that after four hundred thirteen years of an eye for an eye, there will no longer be a death penalty in the state that hosted more revenge killings, of mostly black men, than any other.
An East Coast professor who specializes in police studies was kind enough to write in response to the introductory edition of Drunk & Disorderly that I send folks new to the newsletter.
One of the articles in it, “First…Kill All the Black Men,” talks about the struggle some police officers over the years have had in bringing black males of almost any age to justice without killing them first. Among the (some would say assassinated) men and boys mentioned there are Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner of New York City, and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland.
The professor said there are many reasons to question police killings of Black men, but that I should look at Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer Jonathan Capehart’s article, “‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’ Was Built on a Lie,” before I use the Michael Brown shooting as an example.
My own education was mostly out West, and I’ve been told schools out here ain’t quite as smart as the Ivys and such. So whenever I get some advice from anyone anywhere near the Ivys, I tend to take note.
And after reading the Capehart piece, and the U.S. Department of Justice Report it was based on, which came out seven months after the Brown shooting (three months after I’d written about it), I see that the professor has a point. You’ll see it too if you click on the links in that last sentence.
The second link is to an official government report, and government reports can be persuasive, if sometimes built backwards, starting with a conclusion that then looks for facts to support that conclusion.
Still, I’m inclined to believe this one.
But then comes along another white cop to kill another unarmed black man last March, Daniel Prude of Rochester, New York. We know Daniel was unarmed because police body cam footage shows him lying naked and handcuffed in the street under lightly falling snow, in obvious mental distress. His distress turns physical after the cops slip a white mesh hood over his head, pin him to the frozen asphalt and lean into his head till he stops talking, stops moving, stops…everything. And another grand jury says yes there’s harm, but no foul. I’m not sure I saw the cops in that video show any obvious bias toward a black man; I’m not sure I saw them treat him, as a man.
I like to keep an open mind. But every time I hear a grand jury like this one yesterday, or read a government report, that says it’s okay to stick a bag over a black guy’s head and keep it there till he stops breathing, my mind moves just a little further from government reports.
