Philip Rosmarin

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

The first full month of spring, and I’d like to step back, for just this month, from the serious and often painful business of criminal justice and human rights.

Music heals, and music from a pretty young thing who happens to be my daughter heals me the most. I’d like to share some of the music she and her husband are creating, and in a moment you’ll see why you may forgive that description of her.

If you like what you hear in this and the next couple of posts this April, share it with your friends. Hell, share it with your enemies. The world could use a little more tenderoni and sugar fly.

Listen here.

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

Did I ever mention that I’m a criminal defense lawyer? I know the definition of treason. It’s right there in the United States Code. Title 18, section 2381.

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

Donald Trump owes allegiance to the United States. He swore it on a Bible he’s never read. He sticks to Russia like a pimple on a porn star. He gave our enemy aid and comfort before the election, and he continues to give it. Russia, with his televised encouragement, interfered in the election that elevated him to office he never could have reached on his own, and continues to interfere in our elections because he knows they’re interfering for his benefit so does nothing about it.

I don’t support the death penalty (not even for an exception in his case), but I could support making this guy move his gold toilet to a five-star maximum security prison somewhere. We’ve got a nice one in my home state that would love to have him. His golf game might actually improve: he’d get putting privileges one hour every day. Five years should just about cover it: we’re not vengeful monsters.

If we can’t jail this Manchurian candidate, the least we can do is impeach him. Cass Sunstein is a leading American constitutional law scholar. Last fall, two weeks before the anniversary of Trump’s election, Sunstein published “Impeachment: a Citizen’s Guide.” Without ever mentioning Donald Trump, he describes the historical roots of impeachment (“discussed intensely in the colonies” at least since 1635), its constitutional imperatives, and the kinds of Presidential behavior that may trigger it.

Sunstein describes a number of “easy cases” for impeachment.

• First up, a president who has admiration and sympathy for a foreign nation that wishes to do harm to the United States. Describe anyone you know? This president, while in office, reveals classified information to leaders of that nation. Remember that photo of Trump in the Oval Office with Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russia Ambassador Sergey Kislyak? All of them laughing their heads off as Trump shared Israeli secrets with them. That was a Russian photo, by the way — no U.S. photographers allowed inside. Easy call. High crime or misdemeanor.

• Next, a president orders a federal agency to investigate a political opponent, because he (or just maybe she) is a political opponent. Trump has, many times, pressured both the Justice Department and the FBI to stop investigating him, and instead investigate the political opponent he (and Russia) defeated. “It’s a misdemeanor, in the constitutional sense,” Sunstein writes, “for the president to use his authority to single out political opponents for law enforcement activity.”

• A president decides to spend an inordinate amount of time away from his duties, neglecting the office. This president, barely a year in office, has spent about a quarter of his time at the golf course; you and I have spent about sixty-two million dollars paying for his endless mulligans. His typical day at work: start at 11 a.m., meeting with Chief of Staff John Kelly for a few minutes, with as many visual aids as Kelly can muster; an hour to recuperate from that mental effort; an hour for lunch; an hour and fifteen minutes to digest; forty-five minute meeting with someone with more visual aids; fifteen minute breather; the last exhausting half-hour meeting of the day; day is done at about 4:15 p.m. Actual estimated work time: nearly an impressive three hours. It’s okay, he may be pacing himself for his second term.

• “A president is elected as a result of a secret plan with a nation that is unfriendly to the United States. As part of that plan, the president has worked closely, and personally, with leaders of that nation to disseminate false information about his political opponent.” Wonder what Sunstein is talking about here. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” — who said that again?

• A president uses his pardon power to pardon in full police officers who have committed federal crimes — not because they have been unfairly accused but because they are supporters and because the president wants to send a signal to others who have committed crimes for him and may be the beneficiaries of future pardons. Where have you gone, Joe Arpaio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

• In a domestic crisis, the president fails to perform the basic tasks of his job. Russia’s assault on our elections — its continued assault on our elections — not only has prompted an approximately zero response from Donald Trump, but also hasn’t appeared to make the slightest dent in his brain pan. It doesn’t matter whether that’s because he’s too venal to do anything about it, or too mentally ill, or too stupid, or too lazy: he has failed to perform the basic task of defending America against an enemy.

So yes, using his own words, let’s impeach this son of a bitch.

Because this is what I think:

Donald John Trump is a traitor to the United States of America. He — not the news media — is the enemy of the people. He is under the thumb of a foreign government because he took money from them (and laundered much more) when no one else would lend it to him, and probably because he watched a lady go wee on a Moscow hotel bed and they have the video of his stupid grinning face to prove it.

Donald John Trump has conspired to commit, or has committed, the crime of obstruction of justice numerous times during Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry: when he demanded loyalty of FBI Director James Comey; when he asked Comey to fuggedaboud National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s later confessed crimes; when he asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to put pressure on Comey; when he fired Comey; when he first tried to sweet talk and then fired United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara; when he conspired with others, and still conspires to float the idea of firing Mueller (and speaking of Presidential floaters, when he hints of pardoning others swept up in the Russia probe); when he dictated the lies about his idiot son’s meeting with Russians in Trump Tower; when he conspired with the right honorable toady Devin Nunes to sabotage the House Intelligence investigation; the list goes on and beggars my own attention span and yours.

Donald John Trump is a two-bit con man, and that’s giving him twice the credit he deserves.

Among those he has conned are the evangelicals who forgive him his trespasses because there are just too many to worry their pretty little heads about. Donald John Trump worships not God but gold.

Donald John Trump is an uncharged serial sex offender, and a fully charged sex creep.

Donald John Trump is an unabashed racist authoritarian who’s never met a murdering tyrant he didn’t like and wished he could emulate.

I hesitate to add that Donald John Trump is the greatest liar in the history of the Republic; I hesitate because he so loves superlatives that he’d surely regard that as a compliment, and I come to bury him, not to praise him.

That’s not all that I think about this morally and socially degraded man. But that’s exactly what I think.

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

My mother was from Texas, so I just hate it when someone from Texas says something so dumbass you start to wonder whether “dumbass” quite covers it.

Curtis Rhodes (no relation to any scholar, or even any scholarship I’m aware of) is the superintendent of the Needville Independent School District. He’s sternly warned his students that if any of them dare protest gun violence, during school hours, they’ll be sorry. Maybe not as sorry as the kids who’ve suffered gun violence all over America, but pretty sorry.

“Please be advised that the Needville ISD will not allow a student demonstration during school hours for any type of protest or awareness!!” Rhodes proclaimed. Never mind that “awareness” is kind of a cornerstone of education.

Rhodes thinks a three-day suspension might concentrate their minds on reading, writing, and whatever other subjects oughtn’t be interrupted by the sounds of kids protesting their sacrifice to the gun lobby, even if the protest is off-campus. He doesn’t mention interruptions that might occur when kids are gunned down in the schools.

He doesn’t mention the Constitution of the United States of America either, which inconveniently protects such protests against administrative punishment. The question of whether students can protest during school hours has been settled law for almost fifty years.

That case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (what is it with independent school districts anyway?) also involved gunfire. High school students in 1965 wanted to show support for a truce in Vietnam over the Christmas season. Kids wore black armbands and vowed to fast on 16 December, when school was in session, and on New Year’s Eve, when it was not.

Those actions terrified the conservative Des Moines principals, who suspended the students. Parents took the quaking administrators to court. Four years later, when all the students had graduated and maybe gone to Vietnam themselves, the United States Supreme Court said, seven to two, free speech outweighs quaking conservative administrators.

Neither students nor teachers, the court held, “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

This isn’t Rhodes’s first rodeo: he’s tried to hogtie students’ rights before. Ten years ago, he suspended a five-year-old Native American boy whose Apache parents refused to cut his hair “to the right point” (Rhodes’s words) on religious grounds. A federal judge ruled against him then.

For an educator, he doesn’t seem to learn his lessons.

He’s not alone. Yesterday, with Rhodes’s students unaffected because on spring break, 900 students in a Chicago school district were marked truant for speaking out, by walking out, against a society that is content to put them, and keep them, in the sights of military-grade weapons. The district promised punishment for all of them.

At least one New York school physically blocked the exits to keep students from demonstrating. Apart from safety issues, that’s a crime punishable under federal law by twenty years in the slammer. Still, if only a few of the teachers had been armed, the whole sorry spectacle could have been avoided altogether with just a few warning shots fired into the air.

A public school spokesperson in Jenks, Oklahoma, said students should have known they would be punished because it’s right there “in our student handbook.” Probably had no idea the United States Constitution trumps all but the most polished of student handbooks.

An Arkansas high school student said the physical paddling he received as punishment for protesting his potential shooting death “left nothing more than a temporary sting on my thighs.” He didn’t mention the permanent stain it’s left on the school district there.

Not all administrators are craven martinets of discipline. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York not only urged educators not to punish students literally crying out for their lives, but he stood with them, boots on the ground. “To punish or discipline them,” he said, “is inconsistent with the freedom of expression that we cherish. It would say more about the adults imposing discipline than it would about the students who exercised their rights to speak out.”

For those adults, there is only shame.

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

I meet a lot of lawyers, of course. In the criminal defense business, some of those lawyers are family lawyers.

A family lawyer I met the other day committed, right in front of me, what I would consider a crime. A murder, really.

I met her at the movies. Or rather, in the movies. In one of them. Last night was the ninetieth edition of the Academy Awards. One of the nominated films, for best documentary short subject, was “Edith + Eddie.” I urge you to see it, here, and soon, because you never know how long it will be there.

Edith and Eddie met and married in the ordinary way of lovers. What was not ordinary is that they married at ninety-five and ninety-six. They expected the marriage to last about as long as the honeymoon. Eddie called it “love at first sight.” A sight for four very sore eyes.

The marriage was blessed by one of Edith’s daughters. But it was damned by a second daughter who wanted to sell Edith’s house, where the newlyweds dwelled. That daughter claimed Edith incompetent to live with Eddie because she suffered what was diagnosed as mild dementia. Edith does not appear demented in the film. She appears to be a woman very much in love with a man who is very much in love with her. Romeo and Juliet but…older.

Because the daughters couldn’t agree what was best for Edith, a helpful judge appointed the Virginia lawyer I mentioned as Edith’s guardian. The filmmakers say the guardian lawyer, without the inconvenience of having to meet Edith, decided it best to move her to live with the second daughter in Florida (where Edith says she’s been physically abused) and sell her house, out of the proceeds of which the fine lawyer will be paid. Eddie didn’t seem to factor into things.

The lawyer does what some lawyers do best: she lies to her client. She tells Edith, to convince her she needs to leave Eddie, that “it’s a little vacation time while we figure out how to get you a little more appropriate care.” Edith doesn’t buy it, but the police are on standby to help sell the proposition.

The lawyer also lies to Eddie, telling him Edith will come back in two weeks. “And you can call her every single day on the phone and talk to her,” the lawyer lies as smooth as you please. I suppose that is not technically a lie. Eddie does call her every single day for two weeks. They just don’t let him actually talk with Edith.

Eddie, alone now, sits in a chair, looking at a picture of the bride he can no longer see, or even talk with. Every day for the two weeks he’s been told she’ll be gone.

On the day of her promised return, he waits. Through the morning, through the afternoon, into the night, when he finally understands in his mind that she will never be returned to him. He understands it in his mind, and then understands it in his body, collapses in his grief into a coma, and dies.

I reached out to this lawyer, whose middle name is Joy, to see if perhaps she wanted to tell her own, unedited version of what she’d done. To counter the reactions of folk who call her an inconsiderate savage, who pray for her to be struck down like Eddie. She didn’t reach back.

To be honest, I’m a little bit glad I didn’t have to talk with that lawyer.

That lawyer who, right in front of me, stuck a knife in an old man’s heart.

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

Real heroes don’t talk about what they would do: they just…do it. Football coach Aaron Feis put himself between his students and the shooter who tried to kill them at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

According to Pia Guerra, a Vancouver, British Columbia, illustrator, this is what happened next (she called it, Hero’s Welcome):