Philip Rosmarin

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

The first hundred days.

It’s grown harder and harder to see the America I know through the fog of ignorance, xenophobia, and me-firstness that is the so-called Trump administration, through these long, long days.

It’s not that we were actually that shining city on a hill. It’s that we aspired to be. We don’t share that anymore.

In the first hundred days, according to the Brennan Center for Justice and elsewhere:

The President of the United States has repeatedly lied about an “American carnage” of crime, citing a phantom crime wave begun under his predecessor, and vowing to crush it (just as soon as he can actually find it).

Hate crimes, on the other hand, against people listed in the handbooks of the KKK, really are on the rise.

The mad elf who calls himself the Attorney General of the United States has urged his army of U.S. Attorneys to ramp up prosecution of the Mexican “filth” who “rape and kill innocent civilians” in the homeland they pretend to make their own. Jeff Sessions also called for the destruction of sanctuary cities in “the Trump era,” momentarily forgetting those folks protect the filth that harvest the prunes that keep the little guy regular.

He’s also branded, as a “war on police,” previous Justice Department efforts to reduce the number of times poorly trained white cops shoot unarmed black men and boys. The number of new targets he’s painted on black backs is yet to be determined.

The President has vowed to deport three million people. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” he suggests, “and I will get ‘em outta here.”

For-profit private prisons are making a comeback, reversing another Obama effort, to put fewer of our people in prison and keep them there.

There’s a new war on drugs, emphasizing treatment for white people addicted to pain-killer opioids, and prison for pot-smoking colored folk.

Dictators and other idols of the far right are finally getting the Presidential adulation they feel they’ve always deserved.

Sexual harassment and even assault likewise are receiving the support its perpetrators have long sought.

We have by far the greatest Cabinet money has bought.

A wholly new crime has been added to the U.S. Code: theft of a Supreme Court Justice.

No more sissy talk about closing Guantanamo: we’re gonna make it bigger and better.

Talk about draining the swamp has been clarified: Trump really meant he was going to drain the wetlands and roll back other environmental protections — for the good of the environment, of course.

He’s restored full Second Amendment rights to the mentally ill so they can kill school children just like anyone else.

And he’s discovered military power the quickest and surest popularity poll adjuster.

Not to mention the Muslim ban. Nor the attempt to euthanize thousands of Americans by taking them off health care support. Nor the big, beautiful wall (Canada’s considering its own wall to keep fleeing Americans out). Nor the endless, endless lies and puffery (biggest electoral victory, biggest crowds, biggest dick — though to be fair he may well be the biggest dick Americans have ever elected, to any office).

It’s to the point that the best we can now hope for is this:

The last hundred days.

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

My cousin Foster welcomed the men who came to put him to death. He never put up a defense after he killed his wife. Never claimed, even temporary, insanity. Didn’t file an appeal. Took the gas that killed him deep into his lungs. He was sorry for what he had done, sorry for his children whom the State of California would, in a few minutes, orphan. He couldn’t wait to die.

The State of Arkansas this month couldn’t wait to kill eight of its prisoners. Thanks to meddling courts, they only got to kill four, and they don’t know when they’ll get to kill the rest, and the twenty-five other inmates idling on death row.

The unseemly haste to exterminate as many as possible was because in only three days the freshness date of one of the state’s poisons comes due. After that executioners may have to resort to plain old bashing in the brain like you might some garden vermin that dared into your begonias.

Now that sounds crude and horrible, but the truth is more horrible. The three drugs used in lethal injection individually are medicines used to enhance and save lives, but in combination are lethal. One is a paralytic, and usually masks the effect of another that when injected causes excruciating pain. So that while to a spectator an execution may look almost peaceful, the human being executed may feel like he or she is being burned alive.

The drug companies themselves are appalled that their medicines are being used for this purpose, and by contract require they in fact not be used in executions. But Arkansas and other states have paid premium prices to distributors to violate their contracts, and guarantee their anonymity.

The President of the United States once indignantly called for the mass execution of five young black men in his hometown who were convicted of a crime they did not commit. Even when he learned they were innocent, he stuck to his view (much as he still believes Andrew Jackson was really, really pissed off about the Civil War, albeit from the vantage of his grave). His Attorney General thinks the death penalty is not too fancy for the mentally ill.

Such is the state of death penalty jurisprudence and practice in the Trump Era.

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

“By ratings standards,” the Murdochs say today of the King of Cable News who liked to masturbate to the sound of sexual harrassment (his own), “Bill O’Reilly is one of the most accomplished TV personalities in the history of cable news.”

No word on how he ranked by social standards. None at all.

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

Missouri is the Show Me state. So when a woman there became a victim of repeated and violent domestic abuse, Missouri showed her…the door. She was kicked out of her home, kicked out of her city, and ordered not to come back for six months.

That’s the law in Maplewood: tell the cops your boyfriend beat you up, stabbed you, or shot you more than twice in six months, and he may or may not go to jail, but you will definitely be on the streets.

Worse, that’s the law (or there are laws similar to that) in communities across the United States. They’re called nuisance abatement ordinances, and are intended to allow cities to declare any number of conditions, from trash violations to repeated violations of the criminal law (such as assault), a public nuisance that can then be legally rectified.

Until ten years ago, that was the law in my own community, Boulder, Colorado. In 2007 the nuisance abatement ordinance was changed to make an exception for victims of crime, such as domestic violence.

The American Civil Liberties Union has a project to go after other communities like Maplewood where that exception has not been written into the law. One by one, they’re filing lawsuits, and one by one, cities are settling and changing the law.

Its latest lawsuit is in Maplewood. That one will likely settle, too. It will settle a few thousand dollars on the woman whose loved one left her scarred with stab wounds, whose community left her scarred with the gut fear of ever calling the police and rendered homeless again.

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

There is no fool like an April fool, and I went to see one today. I don’t mean Hal Holbrook, the magnificent ninety-two-year-old actor who for the past sixty-three years has made his living channeling my multiply-great uncle Sam Clemens, whom many people recall as Mark Twain.

Mr. Holbrook performed “Mark Twain Tonight” in Denver. Tickets to his performance were a gift from my children, who thought their old dad, and significantly younger mom, ought to at last see this inspiring portrayal of the distant relative (grandmama was a Clemens) he’d bragged on all their growing years.

Mark Twain talked and wrote a lot about politicians, so it wasn’t surprising that Hal Holbrook would speak to his Denver audience about politicians, and he did. He talked about the President of the United States.

“No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted,” he lamented.

Piling on, he said, “I think the President is clearly insane in several ways, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories. I think he longs for a big war wherein he can spectacularly perform as chief general and chief admiral, and go down in history as the only monarch of modern times that has served both offices at the same time.”

Well, this was just too much to bear for one Trump voter in the audience, who interrupted the performance to shout from his seat, “Where’s Mark Twain?”

In the age of Trump, heckling of the old, the lame, and the less-than-seven-on-a-scale-to-ten is enjoying a big comeback. But to answer that boor’s question, Mark Twain was right there in front of his eyes. What that April fool didn’t understand, because stupidity is the close companion of boorishness, is that Hal Holbrook was reciting the words of Mark Twain, who had the great good fortune never to meet the forty-fifth President, but had met the twenty-sixth: Teddy Roosevelt.

SAD!