Philip Rosmarin

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

When my son was four years old, one early morning he came running into our bedroom in some distress. He cried out to my wife and me, tears in his eyes, to hurry, come and see. We followed him to the front window. He pointed out.

“Look!” he wailed, “they’re stealing our trash!”

It was Thursday: trash pick-up day. 

Where I live now the other day, in Boulder, Colorado, a man was accosted, not by a toddler just learning how things are done, but by a half-dozen police, hands on their guns, for much the same thing. He was picking up trash. He didn’t work for the trash company. He lived there.

He wasn’t treated as if he lived there. He was a black man in a white neighborhood.

The video a neighbor took of the encounter isn’t quite “Jews will not replace us” caliber, but is chilling.

An officer stands, hand on his gun, confronting the man. A neighbor implores the officer: “Go home. There’s a camera on you officer, take your hand off your gun. He’s picking up trash, and you have your hand on your gun?”

The black man is enraged, though not confrontational. He’s holding a bucket in one hand, a trash grabber in the other. To anyone who isn’t legally blind, it isn’t threatening in the least. He’s not even pointing the trash grabber at the officer. “You’re going to shoot me? I’m standing on my own property, and you have your hand on a gun, threatening to shoot me, because I’m picking up trash. I’m pretty upset.”

The neighbor cries out, “What am I watching? Oh my GOD!”

More officers arrive. More threats that another unarmed black man will be slaughtered by another ill-trained cop who perceives dark skin as a threat in itself.

“We live here,” the neighbor implores.

And then the officer uses the phrase that countless unarmed black men have heard just before they died: “Drop the weapon!” the officer commands while pointing to the plastic trash grabber.

“I don’t have a weapon,” the man says. All he needs to do now, to end his life, is to make some move this idiot cop can interpret as furtive or sudden; that’s all he needs to end this man’s life.

The neighbor continues to implore: “He lives here. This is family.”

The black man says he lives in the building, goes to school here, that the cop has no right to be doing this.

The neighbor now begins to scream at the cops, and if I were the cop I’d be more scared of the neighbor, but the neighbor is white, and all the focus of bringing deadly force to bear is on the black man. “NO RIGHT AT ALL!” the neighbor screams.  “WE FUCKING LIVE HERE! PICKING UP GARBAGE!”

There are now eight officers surrounding the black man, at least one with his weapon drawn.

“Eight officers of the law, with guns drawn, for picking up garbage on our property,” the neighbor says unbelievingly, “on our property, where we live. 

“(He) has a clamp, and a bucket,” he adds disgustedly. 

Another officer wields a shotgun. Shotgun vs. trash grabber. Mexican standoff. The officers are in contact with the watch commander at the police station, who advises that maybe they should simply walk away, leave the man and the neighborhood in peace. Apparently there is nothing in the Colorado Revised Statutes where a bucket and a trash grabber implicate a crime.

And so they gather their pride, and their guns, and they leave.

The black man needn’t die today. Not today.

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

I got a call this morning from a fellow who hoped I could get his hunting license back. Most people who hunt like to take a gun along, rather than a bow or maybe their bare hands. He lost his gun rights more than a decade ago, after a domestic violence conviction.

He said he’d always wanted a chance to go big game hunting. To get a trophy he could hang on his wall. Colorado, where I live, had just posted its Big Game Hunting Planner, and if I could help him, maybe he’d be able to join in the fun, in the fall. Could I get him started?

I told him I couldn’t help him. Short of a governor’s pardon, I didn’t think he could get his gun rights back, because of the domestic violence.

I didn’t tell him I was sort of glad I couldn’t help him. Some years ago CBS television aired a documentary about America’s big game hunters, and their hunted. It was timed with the opening of hunting seasons across the country.

It brought hunters who kill, not for food, but for sport, into a perspective few of us have ever seen, even those of us who hunt. For those of us who have never been on hunt, we saw for perhaps the first time how wild things are slaughtered. We saw them shot, saw them twitch, heard them moan, saw them die. For us who have hunted, we saw ourselves in a new way: it’s not the same squeezing a trigger as watching yourself squeeze the trigger.

We saw some friendly black bears browsing a county dump, taking food from the hands of tourists. The CBS cameras showed us the same black bears, used to the human presence and unused to fear, on the first day of hunting season, one day later. We saw America’s sportsmen come within feet of the bears and gun them down, the bears standing still, still looking for a handout. They finish the bears off like they finish off a man shot by an inept firing squad, with a bullet behind the ear. An execution.

We saw a quite beautiful woman on her first hunt. She got herself a buffalo on a preserve. A game official drove her out to the herd and picked one out she liked and had her wait for a clear shot and she dropped it and waited until it stopped kicking in the dust. “It’s one of the Big Ten,” this quite beautiful woman said when asked why she wanted to shoot a buffalo. Bagging ten selected animals gets you into a famous sportsman’s club. It was all very wonderful and I hope to God I am never left alone in the company of a woman as beautiful as that one.

The game official was a marvelous fellow, too: he took the woman’s money and called it wildlife management.

We saw two more sportsmen go after some more exotic game imported and raised for the kill on a hunting preserve, two strong sportsmen who huffed through wide brush spaces and shot their animals in a little more than ten minutes. They were really fine sportsmen and would have bagged their game sooner but for the pot bellies they grew in the city and that slowed them some.

One of them took a while to kill his animal, some kind of beautiful elk, and he put five rounds into it and said it was stubborn and put another shot in its head, in the back beneath the skull so it wouldn’t spoil the trophy, and he tried to pose with the animal so his guide could take the picture he wanted, but his pot belly kept getting in the way and he couldn’t force the animal’s head into quite the right position because the animal was still alive and it all frightened the great hunter a bit. He didn’t get a very good picture.

I remember I used to hunt the Northern California woods with my uncle and we’d track the bears and the rabbits and the raccoons but we wouldn’t kill them. The joy then was in the tracking. Once my uncle convinced me I would never know what hunting was really about until I killed something. We tracked all day and the dogs treed a raccoon. I shot it through the eye. I picked it up by the tail and looked at its spoiled bandit face and the ‘coon’s life ran down my arm and dripped off my elbow. I looked at my uncle and he saw my face and my uncle who told me I wouldn’t know hunting until I’d killed something was crying. I never hunted again.

Not until CBS took me hunting those years ago and I saw what my uncle saw. Until that I didn’t know anything about it. You don’t know what big game hunting is like until you see a bear tame as a pet executed and slung up against a tree, the blood caking its coat, its tongue lolling from its dead mouth.

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

Every once in a while a blog called Drunk & Disorderly ought to run a story about somebody being drunk, or disorderly, or maybe both.

So I perked right up when I heard that not just one — not even just two — but three cities in my home state were named best cities for beer drinkers in America (that is to say, in the United States — there are plenty of fine beer-drinking cities in the rest of the Americas).

That would be good news for any beer-blooded American, but it’s really good news for any lawyer who’s ever done a DUI. We’re talking job security, son.

Denver leads the way in Colorado, at No. 7. Fort Collins up north sneaked into the Top Ten this year, at No. 10. And Boulder, where I live, just missed the cut, at No. 11. I feel a little guilty about that, because I hate beer, or at least the taste of it: I think it tastes like horse piss. Don’t ask how I know. But I feel if I liked it just a little bit, we could’ve pushed into the upper ranks.

Everybody else knows beer is good (that’s actually the wi-fi password of one of the restaurants around here). It’s got some good vitamins. It’s better than eating ice cream or steak, and much better than eating both of those together. You don’t have to brush your teeth as much. It may reduce inflammation, a big help to people who fall down a lot while drinking beer.

It’s said that when he heard no state had better beer-drinking conditions in the entire country, Brett Kavanaugh booked his entire Supreme Court summer recess for Colorado. He really liked beer in high school and college, all his friends — boys and girls — really liked beer, they all still like beer. He found it particularly excellent for forgetting a series of unfortunate events.

Oh, and the No. 1 beer-drinking city?

Portland. I wonder if Oregon has reciprocity for Colorado lawyers.

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

They say justice is blind.

A man I talked with a while ago — the father of a tennis pro acquitted of charges of raping a former student and two other teenage girls — will tell you justice is deaf and dumb as well.

He didn’t want to talk with me. “We’re afraid to talk about it — that’s how frightened we were,” he told me. “If the police could do this to us…” He let the sentence hang ominously.

What the police did to them, what they did to his son, was to confront the young man at his home, where he’d quietly lived with his parents for twenty-six years, slap a pair of handcuffs across his wrists, and march him off to jail in the middle of the night.

Exactly thirty days earlier, three girls aged fifteen to seventeen were returning to their dormitory after a dance at their private girls’ school. Out of the dark, the girls said, came a tall, thin, athletic-looking man in his late forties. His legs were bare; he might have been jogging. Most men don’t jog, however, with a bandanna pulled over their faces. And most don’t carry a gun.

One after another, he made them lie on the ground, face down. One after another, he made them turn over onto their backs; one after another, he raped them. The girls said they could hear joggers run by, unaware, only a few feet away. The girls were afraid that if they screamed, or made any noise at all, he would kill them.

After a month-long investigation, the young tennis pro was arrested. Before his arrest, he had been doing well, with his own tennis shop. He coached the college women’s varsity team, and taught at the victims’ school. In fact, he gave tennis lessons to the key witness among the victims.

At trial, that girl testified that as she and her two friends pored over police mug shots, trying to spot their assailant — whose bandana had at one point in the attack slipped to his chin — she was startled by, and then set aside, a picture of the accused.

“That can’t be him,” was her reaction. “I know him.” She had been in a group of girls who had taken ten ninety-minute lessons from him.

Later, according to her testimony, she feared he might indeed be the rapist. The other two girls, too, said the photograph most closely resembled their assailant.

The circumstances under which his likeness came to be in the presence of prospective rapists, and other details of the police investigation and the trial, were never disclosed. The judge, to protect the teenage victims, closed the trial to the public and the press, and ordered that transcripts of the testimony and documents pertaining to the proceedings be sealed. Though the local newspaper filed suit against the court, by the time the case was heard the young man had already been acquitted at trial, and the higher court ruled that, despite the judge’s error, the issue was moot, and unsealing the files would only harm the victims.

The decision certainly harmed the accused man. Because the trial was conducted in secret, that secrecy reinforced the public’s natural suspicion of an arrested man. Because nothing was made public, other than the jury’s verdict of not guilty, there was nothing to suggest he was indeed innocent. Pre-trial newspaper and television coverage in abundance about his arrest suggested he could well be guilty. “He got off!” was the common reaction after the verdict.

The district attorney certainly believed that. The police were positive of it.

During the seven months between his arrest and acquittal, the accused was punished almost as if he had been convicted. His business was shattered. He couldn’t teach tennis anymore: not many fathers send their daughters off to be taught tennis by men accused of rape. In the course of the trial, someone painted “RAPIST” on the front of his tennis store. He closed the store.

The father said his son was a ruined man.

There was no justice for him.

Neither was there justice for the victims. Someone raped those three girls.

But the district attorney who prosecuted the case, said that unless the rapist just presented himself, there won’t be another day in court for the girls. “If you try one set of people for a charge,” the prosecutor said, “and they’re acquitted, you can kiss it goodbye.”

I asked the chief investigating officer assigned to the case about the implication of the verdict — that if it is true the girls were raped, then it is equally true that the rapist is free somewhere, perhaps still in the community. He was startled by the question.

“No,” he said,” we’re not looking for anybody else.”

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

Laura Berry was no beauty queen. At seventeen, in 1985, she was convicted by an Arkansas jury of the murder of her great-aunt. She hadn’t touched her relative, wasn’t even there when her boyfriend beat the woman to death with a crowbar, a cooking pot, and his fists.

But under the felony murder rule, she was seen as guilty as he was, because she knew he planned to rob her aunt, and because she helped hide one of the murder weapons and fled with him.

So at seventeen she learned the truth, of life without parole. Thirty-two and a half years of it, and not just of valentines she never knew. She was raped in prison by one of her guards, sued him and won, yet bore his child and called the baby boy her saving grace.

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court decided that a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, for a juvenile, is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Four years later, it made that decision retroactive.

Arkansas in response changed its law, and Laura Berry won release from prison.

The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, which helped pass the law, was kind enough to introduce me to Laura.

Laura says that, a year later at fifty-one, she gets up “really early” every day to watch the sun rise. “I have so much I wanna do,” she says, “so much that I missed.”

Like eleven thousand eight hundred seventy sunrises, because of a mistake she made, at seventeen. Talk about your vague obscenities.