Philip Rosmarin

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

Across the pond, to natter means to talk casually, especially on unimportant matters. It can also be a noun, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as in “I could do with a drink and a natter.”

We could all use a drink these days, but thanks to a senior lecturer in criminal justice in Bristol (the one in the wild, wild west of England), we could all use a natter or two as well.

Dr. Edward Johnston, who teaches at the University of the West of England, last week launched the perfect podcast for when you’re quarantined home staring at the floor and wondering whether you’ll ever see the inside of a courtroom again. It’s called “Criminal Justice Natters,” but the title is a bit of a lie, because he plans to talk about, every couple of weeks, some fairly important issues of criminal justice, criminal procedure, and fair trial rights. And if you’re tired of looking at your floor, there’s also a YouTube version.

In the first natter, Dr. Johnston talks with a young man whose ex-girlfriend falsely accused him of rape a few months into his freshman year (they call them freshers over there) studying criminology and criminal psychology. Over the next two years it became his life course, nearly failed by persistent thoughts of suicide.

He was innocent, but people treated him as though he was guilty. That’s how he puts it to Dr. Johnston: he felt he was presumed guilty, then there would be a trial. So he couldn’t wait for trial, but he had to — two years.

For two years, evidence that would free him was withheld from his lawyer — the police denied its very existence. The night before trial, police dumped two thousand four hundred eighteen pages of transcript, of the contents of nearly sixty thousand text messages downloaded from the accuser’s phone, on the lawyer. The lawyer did her job, heroically, and found among the tens of thousands of messages a few that would clear her client. One of them, written to a friend of the accuser days after the alleged rape, described the sex with the young man: “It wasn’t against my will or anything.”

The case was dismissed. The police offered apology; the judge complete exoneration.

This first natter is a painful episode to watch, to realize how much of this young man’s life was, and perhaps remains, derailed. He seems still perplexed by what happened. At one point Dr. Johnston apologizes for the difficulty of some of his questions.

The young man smiles, ruefully. “I’m used to them.”

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

This is the song that got me through the election. That can get us all through the next sixty-five days. The singer is Kay-Kay Filizzola, the guitarist and producer her husband, Fili Filizzola, and they are Sour Honey Nights. You can also find it on Amazon and music streaming services.

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

If I had a hunting accident and blew half my fingers off, I’d still have plenty of room to count the number of Republican lawyers in public life I’m still proud of.

But there’s one in Clearwater, Florida, who’d make me wish for my fingers back so I could include him and a few of his colleagues.

Hell, I’d move to Florida just to vote for him, if he hadn’t already announced his retirement.

Bob Dillinger has been the elected public defender there since 1996.

From the start he became an advocate for the disenfranchised, for the mentally ill, for the homeless, who often find their way into court. When he wasn’t working selflessly to spare some of the least of us from the worst penalty we can inflict on them, of death, he was working to provide encouragement, food, and clothing to disadvantaged children at risk of becoming those people.

He was re-elected in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016.

At his last election it was reported that Jesus Christ Himself voted for him by absentee ballot (Donald Trump instantly whined that was voter fraud).

None of that was what drew me to him. The Pinellas and Pasco counties public defender website did that. Most such website addresses are fairly bland: Brooklyn Defender Services is bds.org; the Los Angeles County Public Defender is pubdef.lacounty.gov; my own state’s public defender address is coloradodefenders.us.

His office is wearethehope.org.

We are the hope. For no other reason than that I checked out his website.

What I saw there was something Bob Dillinger said when he first addressed the men and women with whom he would work for the defense of the seemingly indefensible that is often the work of the public defender. It moved me to remembered tears of when I first felt inspired to champion all the little men and women ganged up upon by the awesome forces of the government — at least till I’d actually met some of those little men and women. (Luckily I met some more who kept me going over the years.)

On his last day, on 31 December, this Atticus Finch of Clearwater will go out with the old year.

On his first day, at his swearing-in ceremony, twenty-three years ago, this is what he said:

We are the hope.

We are the hope of the poor;

We are the hope of those in the system who are innocent;

We are the hope of those overcharged;

We are the hope of the mentally ill that society wants to either warehouse or ignore;

We are the hope of the juveniles who need help and guidance from a system that offers little of either;

We are the hope — probably the only hope — of those our society seeks to execute;

We are the hope.

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

I read the news today that the former leaders of a veterans’ home were indicted on charges of criminal neglect after seventy-six residents died of the coronavirus.

As I write this, two hundred seven thousand, eight hundred twelve residents of the United States have died of the virus, and the leader of our home has yet to be indicted.

Criminally negligent homicide is the killing of a human being that results from the careless performance of a legal or illegal act in which the danger of death is apparent.

Donald Trump’s best and brightest medical advisors have been telling him for more than half a year about the danger of death from Covid-19, yet he continues to lie about it, being sure to protect himself while luring supporters to risk all at super-spreader campaign rallies where he is pleased best when they are masked least.

There is another term in the law for what he demonstrates: depraved indifference, which is an act so reckless and careless of the safety of others that it shows a complete lack of regard for human life.

In the President’s defense is his own assertion that human lives — at least human lives of value to him — have not been taken at all.

“It affects virtually nobody,” Trump said the other day, mere hours before the United States death toll had reached two hundred thousand nobodies. “It’s an amazing thing.” It takes only the old who are already sick, he virtually crowed; those people don’t count.

The New York Times has been documenting these nobodies since March, with “Those We’ve Lost.” At the same time the series began, Trump was urging churches to pack their pews for Easter Sunday.

They start with Vittorio Gregotti, who died in Milan a month of Sundays earlier. The Italian modernist architect rebuilt the stadium that hosted the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics. But he was ninety-two, so he was nobody.

The first six of the more than three hundred lost lives already illuminated by the Times were older than sixty-five, the age group the Centers for Disease Control says are at highest risk.

The seventh on the list, Nashom Wooden, was only fifty. But a Manhattan drag performer in Trumpland? Still a nobody.

Dez-Ann Romain was thirty-six, described as an innovative high school principal with grit and heart, the first New York City school employee to die of coronavirus. Another but: she was black; a nobody.

I love rock ’n’ roll as much as the next fellow, but the guy who actually wrote that song, Alan Merrill, was one of these nobodies.

Kious Kelly, the Times reports, may have been the first nurse in New York to die of Covid-19. His death highlighted the shortage of personal protective equipment for American doctors at the same time the Trump Administration was boasting of having sent nearly eighteen tons of the stuff to China. Kelly, forty-eight, worked in a blue state where he was a nobody, but could have been somebody had he worked instead in the red state where they sent all the PPE.

A thirty-three-year-old advocate for disability rights, a fifty-nine-year-old jazz trumpet virtuoso, a twenty-two-year-old new dad, a forty-eight-year-old police detective — two hundred seven thousand more and growing a thousand more a day — all of them nobodies in Donald Trump’s sparsely populated mind.

But here’s the thing about these nobodies: they are survived by millions of friends and family who will remember exactly which somebody let these people die while perfecting his three-foot putt.

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

Clearly, a world without Ruth Bader Ginsburg, where the graceless man who called her an absolute disgrace to the Supreme Court remains in it, is an unfair world.

Unfair too is that this freakishly small while morbidly obese man may nominate as her replacement someone as unfit for her job as he is for his. (In my grief at her loss I too am unfair, for while it is true that his last pick for the court was a former beer-swilling sexual predator and latter-day beer-swilling pretentiously indignant red-faced liar — a man much like himself, but for the beer — his first pick was, if only by accident, a decent and well-qualified jurist.)

R.B.G., like M.L.K., had a dream: his that some day black people would enjoy equal citizenship with white people; hers that women would enjoy equal citizenship with men. He died too soon. She died after a long life, yet also too soon. The gains she devoted her career to achieving for women face hot and imminent attack from lordly men and subservient women who believe that Eve was created only to be helpmate to Adam.

To her that was nonsense. Asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, she would say, “When there are nine.”

The touchstone of her body of legal work, both as a lawyer arguing before the Court and as a Justice on its bench, was the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that “nor shall any state…deny to any person…the equal protection of the laws.”

Equal protection. She resented that the male establishment thought that demanding equal protection was somehow seeking favor for women. She frequently quoted (including while arguing before the Court) her predecessor in the fight, famed abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who wrote in 1837, “I ask no favors for my sex. All I ask of our brethren, is that they take their feet off our necks.”

She worked not only to protect women’s rights, but also to uncover the rights of women that weren’t in the consciousness of men as even being rights. Not even fifty years ago, only men were thought fit to execute estates. Ginsburg’s brief in a case challenging that preference led the Court to rule, for the first time, that such discrimination, on the basis of sex, violates the equal-protection clause.

As Justice Ginsburg, she wrote the majority opinion that decided the Virginia Military Institute’s discrimination against female students likewise violated equal protection.

There were so many more. So much more to this champion of women’s rights, of human rights.

Ten years ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s husband Marty wrote a last love letter to her as he lay dying. “What a treat it has been,” he wrote, “to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world.”

What a treat it has been, indeed.