Photo by Laura Mantei, who tended a mother’s grave as a kindness to an absent son.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
One of my few remaining memories of my mother, who died when I was thirteen, is of her, bent over our kitchen table, weeping. I can’t remember her face, but I still see her tears in tiny explosions on the Formica. She is reading aloud the two- or three-paragraph story in the Sacramento Bee: our cousin Foster is dead. Forced by the State of California to take poison gas into his lungs, for the murder of his wife.
My mother fought the death penalty and lost. I’ve written about it, as a journalist and as a lawyer, too many times. Too many times, because each time should have been the last.
Today my mother and I — and every person who believes that while some on death row may deserve their fates, we do not deserve to be the instruments of their fates — have won, at least in the state I now call home.
The governor of Colorado has signed his last death warrant. The death penalty itself is dead.
I’d like to imagine my mother, not in a barely marked grave outside Sacramento, but in the heaven she believed in, weeping anew.
Weeping with relief. For the innocent, for the guilty, for all who sit and judge their fates.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
We need space to live.
A message for today, sure. But it’s been told wonderfully before, by animator Nick Park, who won an Academy Award for the little film I’m about to share with you below. It’s also a reminder that beyond human rights, are the rights of others we all live with on this planet.
It’s taken me thirty-one years to see it. Even if you’ve already seen it, it’s worth watching again, if just for five minutes of delightful rest for the news-weary.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Nearly a decade ago a Mexican teenager played what seemed a harmless game with his friends at the Rio Grande: run up the embankment on the U.S. side of a dry culvert, touch the border fence, then scramble back to stand, laughing, on the Mexican side.
Sergio Hernández may still have been laughing when U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa
shot the fifteen-year-old Mexican boy in the face.
Today the Supreme Court conservative majority declared there can be no legal vengeance for his homicide. By a five to four vote, the Court threw out the wrongful death lawsuit brought against the agent by the parents of the child, because the injury occurred outside the U.S. border. Though Mesa fired two shots at the unarmed boy from the U.S. side, the bullet that killed him crossed to the other side of the border to do it.
The border agent was indicted for murder by the Mexican government, but the United States refused to extradite him to stand trial. The Justice Department did its own investigation and as is almost always the case with law enforcement declined to charge one of its own. The agent pretended that the boy was throwing rocks at him when he executed the teen, despite cell phone video that showed it wasn’t true. President Trump, of course, has said that lethal force is justified if someone throws a rock at you, so, no matter.
The Trump administration filed a brief in the case arguing that the boys’ parents should not be entitled to money damages because their son was injured outside the United States, if only a few feet outside and by someone firing at him from the U.S. side of the border.
The notorious RBG, in a written dissent, called BS on that argument.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that because the border agent committed his act, of firing his weapon, while standing inside the United States, the parents of course should be allowed the remedy of suing in damages for wrongful death. “(T)he fortuity that the bullet happened to strike Hernández on the Mexican side of the embankment,” the Justice wrote, “…should not matter one whit.”
To the Trump administration, of course the death of a Mexican kid does not matter one whit.
This won’t be the last time a border agent fires his or her weapon into Mexico from the safe haven of the United States, given the encouragement from its president.
It wasn’t the first, either.
Justice Ginsburg’s dissent cites: a complaint that a “border agent fired fourteen to thirty bullets across the border, killing a sixteen-year-old boy;” a brief “describing various incidents” of “unconstitutional conduct by border and immigration officers;” another “listing individuals killed by border agents.”
Further, a report of “over eight hundred complaints of…physical, verbal, or sexual abuse lodged against Border Patrol agents between 2009 and 2012” of which “in ninety-seven percent of the complaints resulting in formal decisions, no action was taken.”
This is what is becoming of twenty-first century America. At the border with a wall Jesus Christ would have torn down in a heartbeat — on one side the United States, on the other, Mexico — what separates us is not the wall, but a black hole where empathy should be.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
These are good times for a criminal defense lawyer.
The President of the United States is a crook, so he’s always gonna be on your side. The President’s personal attorney, who moonlights as the Attorney General of the United States, is a crook who’s extremely handy to have around at sentencing, should your client be so unfortunate as to have a real trial — you know, the kind with witnesses and documents.
A bunch of spoilsport former employees of the Department of Justice are trying to ruin it for all of us. These obvious malcontents are saying William Barr (the President and I call him Bill) should resign.
And for what? Saying a very good pal of the President should get to go home early? Roger Stone was convicted by the merest accidental carriage of justice. The twelve idiots who said he was guilty — not once, not twice, but a ridiculous seven times — obviously hadn’t been listening to the President, or somehow missed reading his very persuasive Tweets.
You would’ve thought the judge in the case could take a hint. She should have dismissed the whole thing before the trial was even over: didn’t she realize that illustration Stone distributed of the judge in a sniper’s cross-hairs was her? Silly woman.
The sheer number of ex-DOJ lawyers calling for Barr’s resignation — nearly two thousand seven hundred and counting — just shows you what a crowd of goody two-shoes have infested that department over the years. Didn’t they learn anything from the Senate Republicans earlier this month? Justice isn’t about fairness; it’s about winning, and keeping on winning.
With the titles they’ve held — all the way up to Acting Attorney General (for Presidents Nixon and Bush, no less) — you’d think they’d already know that. Some of these folks were working the DOJ when Eisenhower was down the street. One guy’d been there fifty-one years.
What in the world are they thinking?
I know what every criminal defense lawyer in this country is thinking: my next sentencing, I’m calling our good buddy Bill Barr.
