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Philip Rosmarin

About Philip Rosmarin

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The Rule of Law

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

The man who likes to say, he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot somebody and he wouldn’t lose any voters, popped yet another cap in Lady Justice last night. (Despite boyish boasts, he does these things in the dark of Friday when he thinks no one will hear about it till Monday.) Donald Trump freed his criminal co-conspirator Roger Stone by presidential commutation of sentence.

No surprise there. Trump has pardoned twenty-five persons and commuted the sentences of eleven.

All but one of the pardons were of men: too many nasty women around to rate a bigger share of executive largesse. Almost none of them bothered to actually apply for clemency: friends in high places are so much cooler than boring old official channels.

Roger Stone was “prosecuted for covering up for the President” — those are the words of the sentencing judge. Stone knew the get-out-of-jail-free card was coming because Trump told him it was. On 4 June Trump tweeted his assurance to Stone that “He can sleep well at night.”

Stone is just the latest skid mark on this Presidency. Trump has pardoned war criminals and spies, and a sweet old unrepentantly racist sheriff. He pardoned a pal who wrote a glowing biography of — and maybe it’s just a coincidence — Trump. He pardoned people who didn’t do anything he hasn’t done: obstruction of justice, illegal campaign donations, improper use of government property, tax fraud, perjury.

He pardoned one guy just because he used to work for Fox News. Commuted the sentence of one gal ‘cause Kim Kardashian told him to (though even a man whose greatest academic achievement was to ace an Alzheimer’s test could see twenty-one years in prison was a tad excessive for a first-time nonviolent drug offense).

And there was the long-overdue pardon of black boxer Jack Johnson whose crime was to sleep with a white woman, though, like Frederick Douglass, Trump might have thought him a contemporary he might tap for a campaign donation.

Still, most of the folks Trump conveyed clemency upon were at least as deplorable as Hillary Clinton suggested any of his fans could be.

I wish he would stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue. A lot of us wish he would. In front of a Mack truck whose driver is busy polishing the perfect text.

Perfect in every way.

Criminal Justice

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

The Economist asked the other day, “Has America’s Department of Justice been politicised?” (They’re British, you know.)

Politicized? Politicized?

The American Department of Justice has been criminalized.

President Trump has fired two FBI directors who were investigating him, plus two United States Attorneys for the Southern District of New York investigating him and his crime pals — and his personal lawyer who pretends to be the Attorney General, and head of Justice, has helped him do it.

And that’s just the start for these men who should be turning in their ill-fitting business suits for much roomier jumpsuits in Trumpian orange.

A Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted convicted felon Roger Stone just told Congress that he resigned from the case because he was told if he did not go easy on Stone as a favor to the President he would be fired. Three other prosecutors on the case also resigned, and a flunky with no knowledge of the case was recruited to sign a downwardly revised sentencing recommendation for the Department.

A second Justice lawyer testified that political appointees frequently started unwarranted investigations, rejected by career lawyers without axes to grind for the President, to target Trump/Barr enemies.

Barr also, in the minds of many, criminally interfered with confessed perjurer Michael Flynn’s case, ordering it dismissed, and, not so long before that, with the House Impeachment and Mueller investigations. Remember those? Russia, you still listening? How about you, Ukraine? China?

Last question: who do you deputize to arrest the criminal, when the criminal is the highest legal officer in the land who, in fact, can and will order you investigated and arrested?

Homicidal Maniac

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The Seats Weren’t Quite as Empty as the Heads that Tried To Fill Them

 

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

People say that when the toddler in long pants who is the President of the United States was an actual toddler, his mother didn’t kiss him enough; didn’t hug him enough.

Maybe that explains why the massive baby is bent on being the instrument of mass homicide, by his willful bungling of a pandemic, killing more Americans than any enemy foreign or domestic in our history.

Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Come into my rally, said the Donald to the crowd. Donate your masks to the Democrats. Gather together close as you can: it looks so much better for the cameras. Scream and shout and twist about. Let the spittle fly. Forget thermometer checks: who cares if you’re hot; I’m the hottest act out here. Temperature checks are just like infection tests: they’ll just turn up more cases who’d’ve ever heard about.

No man has ever worked harder to kill the memory of a neglectful parent, to kill all our parents.

He deserves to be rewarded for all that hard work.

This is what the President of the United States deserves when he bawls at his next mass rally in the middle of pandemic:

Hugs and kisses.

Lots of hugs and kisses.

Black Lives, White Lives

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

When I mentioned George Floyd in my newsletter last month, it moved a very kind University of Florida criminal law professor to share a list of anti-racism resources for white people.

I don’t know how she knew I was white. There’s no picture of me in the newsletter.

But I’m pretty damn white. I’m a son of Texas who grew up in California singing “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” In the fifth grade I didn’t know why a park along the American River was called Negro Bar: we never saw any Negroes there. I still didn’t know when I wrote that sentence. Just about a minute ago I learned it was called that because of its historical importance. During the California Gold Rush, African American miners became the first to prospect the gravel bar there.

That was part of the Florida professor’s point. Michelle Jacobs wrote, “One of the major problems with the ongoing quagmire of race in the U.S. is white persons generally refuse to take any responsibility for educating themselves on the history of our country. Many persons of color are now feeling terribly burdened with having to repeatedly explain what people could learn for themselves…if they wanted to.”

I think I had that coming — me, and the current president of our country, whom I feel almost affectionate toward, now that I discover we share common ground.

Like him, I haven’t been close to very many black people. I didn’t even meet any black person before the ninth grade. We were both trumpet players, and I became his best friend. But I was his best friend because he had no other friend at an intermediate school with no other black students and no other white students who would even talk to him.

My best friend in law school was black, but I get no anti-racism credit for that. It was in part because she had the most infectious and open laugh I’d ever heard. People of any color, except those just too drenched in racist (de)values, felt good around her.

Maybe unlike the President, I wish I’d found — taken conscious steps to find — more occasion to be around people who weren’t white like me.

So here’s that list of anti-racism resources. “It is a very helpful list of resources,” Jacobs says, “that can help white people educate themselves on many of the issues that fester under the issue of police killings. It is very thorough, gives books to read as well as suggestions for action items.”

There’s stuff in there to help you raise anti-racist children so more kids don’t grow up singing racist rhymes. There are books and articles to read; films, TV series, and videos to watch; podcasts to listen to.

Towards the end of the list is another list, of “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice.”

I just clicked on it. It’s already grown to “97 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice.”

You might want to click on it, too.

We’ve got a lot to do.

Time, Immemorial

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

“Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,
Flying high into the sky.”
The Air Force Hymn

 

There’s a wonderful exuberance in those words, a childlike exuberance I think many of us felt when we climbed into the cockpit of a military jet for the first time. Every time felt like the first time, then.

I have long lost that childlike exuberance; long lost that child.

Willie too was a child of my generation. He was a fresh faced Mormon kid with an easy smile who believed in America but couldn’t believe what America was doing.

He was a boy sent to fight a man’s war. He never wanted to go to war. Like me, he was drafted into the Army and tried to ride out the Vietnam War by enlisting in the Air Force instead. Like me, he never wanted to kill anyone. Like me, he thought he could avoid that in the Strategic Air Command.

We were both four years old when the first B-52 lumbered into the sky; nine, when one of them released the first hydrogen bomb dropped from the air, in a test over the Bikini Atoll. The B-52 was almost solely used by SAC since to ferry nuclear bombs over the Pacific back and forth to near Soviet airspace. Back and forth, back and forth, all day and all night. They called it deterrence.

When we met at March Air Force base in California a decade or so later, Willie and I found we both had the same idea about deterrence: SAC would deter us from the war. We would learn to fly the Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, and if any idiot President sent the order to drop our nuclear bombs, we would drop them, at sea, and look for a place to land our crew somewhere safe, say, Australia. I think we’d both seen Kramer’s “On the Beach.”

As I think I mentioned, we were kids. Our plan contained a fairly sizable flaw: B-52s by that time had been refitted to lay carpet for Vietnam and, for a fair time in secret, Cambodia. Young pilots weren’t going into SAC. They were dropping sixty thousand pounds at a time of conventional bombs on people they never saw.

Plan B was study, train, fly big jets and small, punch volleyballs and sometimes other airmen, and try to figure out a way to get through it, figure out a way just to get back home.

I was lucky, and got out early.

Willie never did figure that out, never figured a way to get back home.

I remember him, every Memorial Day.

I remember him, most every day.

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