Philip Rosmarin

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

An old man died earlier this year, and I’ve been meaning to write about the manner of his passing.

He was the botanist and ecologist David Goodall. Born a Brit, he moved to Australia the year after I was born, to lecture in botany at the University of Melbourne. His career was longer than most: he was still editing scientific papers last year when he was a hundred and three.

He welcomed life, all one hundred four years of it, and he welcomed death. He spent a part of his long life advocating for assisted dying, and at the end chose to die himself that way. Two days before leaving us, he said his life had been spent in the field working, and that he’d love to be able to walk into the bush again, and see what was all around him.

This is what he chose to hear as he slipped away from this life, closing his eyes, looking all around.

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

I left United States high crimes and misdemeanors behind for a blissful nearly three weeks this month, to visit with family of my son-in-law, Fili, and to explore the wonder-full country in which he was born.

The wonders of Brazil were many.

Endless cobblestone streets. I know they were endless because Fili led us up miles of them.

Incredible, unfamiliar wilderness.

Inspired architecture. Art, everywhere.

Stunning beaches. Stunned first by one, then stunned again by the next, and the next, and the next after that. It was winter in Brazil, yet the ocean was warmer than any summer day on the California Pacific, warmer than the lake we usually summer at in upstate New York.

There was unexpected beauty, too. The home of Fili’s mother, with whom we stayed, looked across the way to the favela, a densely packed impoverished neighborhood to the people of which she ministers by day as a nurse. Her son could not walk there unmolested, but there she is regarded as something of a saint for the constant and faithful work she does.

The favela is a kaleidoscope of color climbing into the sky (in the United States, the richest people live atop the hills; in Brazil, the poorest often stake that claim). It literally sparkles at night with spotlights and fireworks, and pulses with live music, a sort of funk carioca, well into the early hours.

Then there was the alarmingly tasty food. A man could grow fat and happy there, though most of the people I saw looked fit. The police looked so fit that I couldn’t help myself from finding one who could speak English so I could tell him they were the fittest I’d seen anywhere in the world. He laughed with what seemed unfeigned astonishment that there might be a fat policeman somewhere out there.

And that was my greatest find in Brazil: the people I met. I barely understood a word of Portuguese. Even that one word I could speak — obrigado (thank you) — I kept mispronouncing as “abrigado” and almost spelled it that way here. But I understood their kindness, their generosity, their willingness to show their best selves to a stranger.

Qualities, like there are in the best of Americans. Like there are in the best of the peoples of all the countries of the world. Folks who aren’t always well-represented by their leaders in government.

There’s a man in Brazil running for President who seems to want to make Brazil great again. He is said to be very like the liar and crook we in the United States elected to our everlasting shame. Most of the people I talked with are terrified of the prospect.

I hope it doesn’t happen there. I’m running out of refuges. I want to return to South America.

I know there is redemption for my America. Maybe it’s only a couple months away. Maybe till 2020 to get my country back.

I can’t quite see it clearly yet. But I have faith, if I wait, wait for just a little while, for my people to show their best selves, that it is there.

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

The other day a colleague asked me why I didn’t applaud the brilliant legal work that persuaded a jury to acquit a man who almost certainly sexually abused his daughter. I said, because of the child.

The victories we achieve in criminal defense often are triumphs not of, but over, what most people would regard as justice. Sometimes, when our clients walk free, their victims walk lost and abandoned.

In another hearing, in another August, I watched William Calley walk free. Four years before, the then-Army lieutenant had gone to trial for the alleged premeditated murder of one hundred two unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, killed in the My Lai massacre. His conviction was for murdering only “at least twenty-two” of them.

And then, after the brilliant legal work that persuaded a judge to end three and a half years of house arrest (Calley served only a day of his sentence in actual prison), the murderer of at least twenty-two human beings walked free. And he was cheered and applauded by the small crowd of veterans, red poppies in their lapels, who attended the hearing.

William Calley was not the only man responsible for what happened at My Lai. He was responsible for what he did and what he ordered done.

To argue that his guilt should have been overlooked because others were overlooked, was to overlook the hundreds of unarmed civilians — as many as five hundred four, most of them women and children and old men — who were slaughtered.

Much was made in his case that Calley’s crime was not his own. It was America’s crime, they said, and he was made an example.

But My Lai was not America’s crime. A whole nation cannot be held to account for the actions of one man, or a few men.

America’s crime was that she did not act against all the criminals and indeed did choose only Calley to expiate her sins. To set free the one man who was proved guilty beyond all reasonable doubt was to complicate the American crime.

We perhaps did not feel at the time the outrage of My Lai because, in the modern parlance of the current American president, My Lai was in one of those shithole countries. We did not know the slaughtered hundreds, they did not look, act, or feel as we do, they were not Americans. Perhaps three years taken from William Calley’s life easily equaled all the years he took from the “at least twenty-two” lives.

American justice did not suffer for his release that other August. Vietnam did not suffer for it.

And the American conscience?

We had probably already forgotten, or surely have by now, that William Laws Calley shot a priest in the face and slung a nursing baby into a ditch before he stitched a pattern in bullets across its enemy body.

I will never forget the small crowd of veterans, red poppies in their lapels, who cheered and applauded their murderer.

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

This is what happens when the President of the United States separates children from their parents to force immigration reform.

A six-year-old girl is separated from her mother by his zero-tolerance policy.

She’s given an almost immediate taste of Trump detention hospitality, and is sexually abused by another, older boy. Anyone remember which U.S. President offered the dating advice, “Grab ’em by the pussy”?

The helpful people at the “summer camp” (that’s what the Trump folks like to call their kiddie jails) explain to her that even though it’s “safe, even fun” there, she needs to acknowledge that sometimes it’s not so safe nor fun. They make her sign a statement that says they explained all about good touches and bad touches. And by the way, they tell her, by signing, it’s your responsibility to make sure you don’t let anyone touch you in that bad way again. Your responsibility; nothing to do with us.

She’s six, though, see, so she doesn’t sign the paper like you or I would. She just signs with a “D.” And where they want her to write her age, written there is “(tender age).” I don’t think she wrote that, do you? She’s six.

But good, she’s been told.

But bad, she doesn’t hold up her end of the bargain she just made. She lets the same little bastard who did it the first time, do it again. Totally on her. They told her to keep her distance. And now, the Fake News has found out about it, and you know who they’re going to blame. Shoulda leaked the story to Fox News first.

Elsewhere, a bunch of teenage boys are forcibly removed to another “summer camp.”

The Trump folk don’t actually screen employees the way actual summer camps do. So okay, a few bad apples slip in. One of them, over just a little bit of time, tries to slip it to eight of the boys, or force them to slip it to him. He ends up charged with eleven sex offenses, all of them not as much fun as the Trump people promised things would be. Forgot to mention, this particular “camp counselor” is HIV-positive.

And there are hundreds of reports like these, of police nationwide responding to allegations of sex crimes at shelters that serve immigrant children. “Serves them” just about describes it.

Just another day for the President. Just another crime against humanity. But hey, all in good fun.

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

The New Yorker magazine, in partnership with The Marshall Project (a truly wonderful nonprofit news group that writes about the American criminal justice system), has created a series of short films about the system, which has put two million, two hundred thousand persons behind bars.

No other country on earth locks up its residents with greater ferocity.

China, second to the U.S. in prison population, has more than four times the people who live there, but one-seventh the rate of incarceration.

One of the U.S. two million-plus was Ayana, subject of the first film who had the great good fortune of being born black and beautiful, but the somewhat lesser good fortune of being born black and beautiful in the United States and growing up to be neither an entertainer nor sports star.

Ayana was married to another black person neither entertainer nor sports star; he played fast and loose with his business, she put some of the money he illegally earned into her own account. Though she had nothing to do with her husband’s business, both were charged with bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

It wouldn’t happen to most suburban housewives: the government wouldn’t orphan most white kids aged six and twelve by putting both their parents in prison. It wouldn’t happen to the current First Lady of the United States, for example, who’s likely lived most of her married life benefiting from laundered money. But it happened to Ayana.

Three years. The same sentence as her husband.

Her first day was the worst day. Thrown into a dorm of newbies — soccer moms detoxing from oxycontin addictions, throwing up all over themselves. Most of them there for money and drug crimes committed by their husbands or boyfriends. Knowing no one. Fearing everyone.

All ages. All cultures. Though inmates hung out mostly by culture, her best friend was a white girl: two suburban housewives, hanging together.

Visits were the best days, and the worst. Her children had gone to school the morning of her arrest, and when they returned, their parents…just gone.

Their caretakers told the children their parents were called into the military. The green jumpsuit mommy appeared in on visitation days was her military uniform. It could not have fooled the twelve-year-old.

Once her daughter didn’t want to leave. She told Ayana, “I just want to stay here with you.” We can go get McDonald’s, she pleaded with her mom, bring it back.

It felt like her kids were ripped from her, again and again. “You kind of feel like a failure, and now you’re failing again.”

She’s out of prison, now, living with her kids. She divorced the man who gave her a little extra money for her own account.

She’s making it on her own, and doesn’t feel like a failure anymore.

“We have our own place, and we have stability, and we stay where we are, and we happy where we are.

“I did it.”