Philip Rosmarin

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

When you practice criminal defense, from time to time you meet a person who actually is a criminal.

I met my first criminal fairly early in my life. While I don’t clearly remember the details, the man later told me that when we first laid eyes on each other, he towered over me (he was much taller), and that when he leaned in to say hello, I spit in his face.

Twenty years later, I found out my father deserved it.

I need not tell his crimes, only that they were against his family.

At the time, for a long time, I thought I should hate him. Hate him for the rest of my life. I found I couldn’t. I had never liked him, but I couldn’t hate him. We all love our fathers, if not the fathers we had, then the fathers we didn’t have.

Many years later, I wanted him to acknowledge his crimes. Not to apologize for them, but just to say, yes, this is what happened. When he didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, a silence fell between us. A dozen years of silence.

In 1999, the year he was to turn eighty, I ended it with a letter and pictures of my children born during the silence. Ended it, because while I remembered his crimes, what he took from my family, I finally remembered too what he gave.

My father gave me my sisters. He gave me my brothers. But for him, I would have never met my mother, Mary Jane Carroll of Amarillo, Texas.

He taught me to catch a baseball.

He gave me an early appreciation of music which has sustained me all my life. Bought me a trumpet through which I learned to blow out my pain (in the beginning, it was painful for everyone).

He told me I’d never be lonely.

These were not small gifts.

And so, I wrote to him:

Dad,

I want you to have these pictures because, at eighty years old, I think you’ve earned the right to decide for yourself if they hold meaning for you.

They are your grandchildren. The boy is Nicolas Warfield Rosmarin. He was born in France, in Paris, 6 February 1993, and he is six years old. The girl is Kathryn Carroll Rosmarin, and from birth we have called her Kay-Kay. She was born 7 June 1995 in Ithaca, New York. She is four years old. In the photograph of three girls, she is the beauty in the middle. They are the most wonderful children a man and woman could possibly be blessed with.

The last time I saw you, it stunned me to numbness to hear you say you did not know whether your brothers or sisters were still alive. It seemed beyond even my imagination.

I realize that, because you chose to shut a door to any attempts to reconcile our past, and because I chose to let the door stay shut, you may not have known my own two children were ever alive.

But for your 80th birthday, I give you this gift, of the knowledge that they live, and, sometimes, ask about their grandfather.

I have never known a love so thoroughly encompassing as the love I know for them. Neither the love for a parent, nor a brother or sister, nor a friend, nor a woman, nor even the woman who is my wife, could be as binding as my love for this boy, and this girl.

My hope for you, near the end of your life, is that — despite what me and my brothers and sisters might have believed about you, and might still, is that you, too, have known this kind of love.

Without it, even the love of a son for his father, a love enduring through every heartache and disappointment, is not enough.

Happy birthday, from your own loving son, whose heart has been healed through his wife and children.

My father, the criminal I met the day of my birth, never read the words, never saw the pictures of his grandchildren.

He had died May Day the year before. He had asked his fourth wife not to tell his children. His obituary named as survivors her children, but not his. I guess he asked her to do that, too.

My father would have been one hundred years old today.

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

The unindicted felon and sexual predator who is President of the United States wants to make America every bit as great as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Those are the countries that boast the greatest number of state executions, and Donald Trump, who is known to enjoy a boast or two, has been apoplectic that this is a category in which he hasn’t been able to compete.

The federal government hasn’t killed anyone, using the death penalty as an excuse to party, since 2003. Barack Obama sure as hell didn’t kill anybody (Muslims don’t count), and Trump is at least twice the President he was (or to be fair maybe a little less, since Obama is really only half-black).

So he’s ordered his personal attorney, William Barr (winkingly also known as the Attorney General), to start pushing the needles as soon as possible, and Christmastime would be perfect.

Though still the only country in the Americas in ten years with a federal death penalty, the United States has fallen off the pace preferred by nine out of ten demagogues, executing only three men since 1994. Most executions in the United States are feted by member state governments, all but one of which that still do were in the Trump electoral column.

When he found out that all his favorite dictators held way more executions than the United States government, Trump was this close to declaring a national emergency. For him it was almost worse than when he found out the State of New York couldn’t execute the Central Park Five teenagers just because they were innocent.

I’ve always stubbornly opposed the death penalty, but to be honest, that was before we had a President who worked with the Russians to become President, and says he’ll be happy to work with them again.

He makes a compelling argument I could be wrong.

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

If words could kill, I’m pretty sure I’d already have solved the problem of what to do about the national disgrace the Russians helped elevate to the presidency of the United States.

Almost as soon as I wrote that sentence, maybe even a little bit before, I began to doubt myself. Not the part about the malignancy in the White House; I’d cut that out in a keystroke. But I’ve known many criminals whose lives were shaped by the words they heard while growing up, usually from their fathers or mothers. Their lives weren’t taken by words, but their sense of self-worth — and by extension the worth of others — surely was.

A juvenile court judge in Massachusetts was much more sure of himself when he convicted a young woman of involuntary manslaughter, a couple of years ago. Lawrence Moniz, who many criminal defense lawyers feel can’t reach mandatory retirement age soon enough, ruled that Michelle Carter, using words alone, caused the death of her virtual boyfriend, Conrad Roy.

He died breathing carbon monoxide in a truck after she encouraged him to complete the suicide he’d planned. The latest suicide he’d planned.

Their relationship was almost entirely through texts and phone calls. Both were teenagers. Lived fifty miles apart. Each professed love for the other.

From the beginning, Conrad had been suicidal, had made other attempts. Michelle initially encouraged him to get therapy for his depression. He was resistant and repeatedly expressed a commitment to suicide. By text, they collaborated on how to do it. She suggested drinking bleach, hanging, jumping off a building. “There’s a lot of ways,” she texted.

He’d ask her to help him do it, repeatedly committed to do it, repeatedly pulled back.

The homicide itself was entirely by text. The words showed she helped him steel his resolve. “If you want it as bad as you say you do, it’s time to do it today,” she wrote. It was another day before he climbed into the truck. One last time he climbed out, and one last time she urged him to finish what he swore he wanted to do, what he asked her to help him to do.

Her lawyers appealed her conviction and fifteen-month sentence, which she began serving in February after Massachusetts’ highest court rejected her claim that words alone could not make her legally responsible for her friend’s death.

The lawyers this month asked the federal Supreme Court to review the case as a violation of free speech protections.

Can words alone kill, they want the court to decide.

In this particular case, I don’t think they can. But I can’t say that I know.

What do you think?

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

There’s an old saying among criminal prosecutors:

“If you want to put someone in a box you’ve got to think outside the box.”

Federal prosecutors tried to think way outside the box last year when they arrested an Arizona State University instructor whose crime was to give food and water to immigrants who had crossed the Arizona border.

Last month at the conclusion of Scott Warren’s trial, jurors scratched their heads and said they just didn’t get it. ’Twas a hung jury. Now the government vows to try him again.

Warren and two of the immigrants he helped were arrested during a raid upon a building long known to Border Patrol agents as a humanitarian way station run by a group called No Más Muertes (No More Deaths). The group offers people food, water, beds, and clean clothes. It was established to try to curb the more than eight thousand deaths of desperate people that have occurred in the Sonoran Desert migration corridor, near the town of Ajo, since the 1990s.

No Más Muertes doesn’t smuggle people, doesn’t do anything to help them get into the United States. Doesn’t do anything but save lives. Warren’s arrest came within hours after the organization showed video evidence of Border Patrol agents destroying life-saving water stations and confiscating blankets.

The government charged Warren with illegally harboring the two immigrants and conspiracy to smuggle them into the United States. He faced twenty years in prison.

This was completely out-of-the box thinking, considering the immigrants were already in the United States when Warren met them. The agents testified that Warren made wavy gestures with his arms and hands in their presence that indicated he was “pointing to known points of interest.”

Very creative. Very out of the box. But in the jury box, out of their minds.

The government is dropping the conspiracy charge, but plans to retry Warren in November for his effrontery in providing food, water, beds, and clean clothes. Hey, in Donald Trump’s America, we don’t even give that stuff to the illegal kids.

Since Warren’s arrest, eighty-eight more bodies have been recovered from the Ajo corridor.

Ajo, indeed.

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

This is how we treat immigrant children — hundreds and hundreds of immigrant children — in the America Donald Trump has made great again:

First we separate them from their parents, or whatever family member brought them in search of a better life. We pretend they are better off alone than staying with people who, if we can’t prove they are criminals now, we’ll get around to it.

By our own law, we put them in “safe and sanitary facilities,” like the one in Clint, Texas, visited last week by lawyers, doctors, and interpreters appalled by what they saw. Three hundred and fifty children were crammed into a detention center designed to hold no more than a hundred and four adults. Our benevolent government recently added a giant, windowless warehouse where we planned to keep five hundred more. Amazing what wonders we can accomplish when we treat people like roaches.

The observers told The New Yorker magazine they discovered untreated flu and lice outbreaks; children covered in filth inside and outside their clothing sleeping on cold concrete floors. Guards wore masks to protect themselves from the stench. Children as young as seven were the only caretakers for infants and toddlers they first met when guards handed them off saying, take care of these kids, will ya?

By our own law, we are to keep them there no more than seventy-two hours in this “temporary” housing. Children have been kept there for weeks.

Children wore shirts stained and wet with mucus, food, and breast milk — some of the children were mothers with children of their own.

As appalling as these conditions, was the brazen hubris of the government “caretakers.” Though they had been told three weeks in advance of the observers’ visit, children were unshowered, or had been allowed to shower only a day or two before the lawyers arrived. Toothbrushes were unavailable, and government lawyers later told incredulous judges toothbrushes and soap were unnecessary luxuries of “safe and sanitary facilities.”

It may not be fair to expect humane or caring treatment of this particular population of immigrant children, from this particular Administration.

By this Administration’s definition, if they are brown-skinned or black-skinned or any-skinned this side of Norway, they come from shithole countries and the dirty, shabby new holes we throw them into — while we decide how best to throw them back where they came from — are an upgrade for which they should be grateful.

An upstart Congresswoman of less than Norwegian complexion called places like this, concentration camps.

Government shills complain that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez implies (she doesn’t, but truth isn’t a player in this administration) that what they like to call summer camps are the same as Nazi concentration camps.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines a concentration camp as a “prison in which large numbers of nonmilitary prisoners are kept…in extremely poor conditions.”

These children are confined in large numbers and prevented from escaping. These children are not soldiers. Only a government lawyer could argue, and his face not crack, that these children are kept in anything but extremely poor conditions.

These are concentration camps.

But good for you, Mr. President, your concentration camps are better than the Nazis’. You don’t kill children by gas or oven; you kill or wound them by neglect and animus.

A half-dozen immigrant children yearning to breathe free American air have already stopped breathing altogether in our care under our President’s so-called watch.

How many deaths of these children will it take till Americans force him actually to open his eyes?