I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A criminology researcher who lectures at the University of the West Indies writes to tell me that the catchy name of my newsletter and blog is also the name of a famous calypso number in Trinidad and Tobago.
I knew I’d heard the words “drunk & disorderly” murmured somewhere else in my unexpectedly long life, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard them spoken with so much fun.
It’s so damn happy I thought it would make a nice holy days treat to share with all of you.
Here it is, with thanks to Dr. Wendell Wallace, who when he’s not hitting the clubs is also deputy dean at the university.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Had he taken better care of himself, my Uncle Sam would have been one hundred eighty-five years old come Monday.
But, he had a few bad habits.
He smoked cigars constantly from about the last time his mother pulled the nipple out of his mouth. He claimed he smoked only in moderation because he smoked only one cigar at a time.
His first love affair was with a bottle of Scotch. He remained faithful all his life.
He drank so much coffee he listed on his taxes as a dependent, Colombia.
He wasn’t very good with money.
But, he had a few good habits, too.
From a distance — a fair distance — he taught me to write. I wanted to be a newspaper man like him, and for a while I was. He wrote a short story that was translated into French. I wrote a short story that I gave a Frenchman to read; I’m not sure he ever read it. I wanted to be funny like Uncle Sam, but I sort of plateaued out a few hundred levels below.
He brought me along on some of his and my greatest adventures. I floated the Mississippi River with him. I met a prince, and about the same time, I met a pauper. You probably won’t believe it, but I once traveled in time with him.
He was a friend to presidents. I have mostly hated presidents.
We both spent a while in California. For a time, I lived in his home state, Missouri, and because of him it did feel like home. Because of some of the other folks there, I felt like a creature from another planet. I fully realized I didn’t really fit when I was compelled by some little voice inside me to turn down an invitation to join the Klan.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was Ethel Clemens. Not that Ethel Clemens. The Ethel Clemens from Texas.
She’s the one who told me her Uncle Sam was my uncle, too.
His full name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Some people called him Mark Twain.
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.
Photography provided courtesy of Pinellas County Marketing and Communications Department
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.
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;
