I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The year I turned eighteen I fenced épée for the University of California at Los Angeles. I was recruited by my roommate, who was a junior British sabre champion who flew through the air with the greatest of ease.
I don’t remember any of us ever thinking we could get in trouble for fencing.
But today a thirty-year-old Russian épée champion is in trouble for fencing. I’m not sure exactly what law Sergey Bida broke, but Vladimir Putin has put his name on Russia’s most-wanted list for denouncing his country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Bida left his country in protest, much as many boys my age did in my fencing days to protest my country’s war in Vietnam.
He still wants to fence — for the United States at the Paris Olympics in July and August.
He has just nine words for Putin.
“Here,” he said, at his California dacha, “I feel more free. I breathe more free.”
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
“God made me do it.”
That’s never been an especially successful criminal defense in the courts I’ve practiced in. Tell you the truth, I’ve never even considered trying that one on. It might work in Texas, where lots of defendants claim that, and folks even blame God for Ted Cruz.
So it was with a fair degree of surprise when I heard that defense raised in my own state. It’s a civil case, but has the potential of becoming a criminal case as well. The Securities Commissioner for the State of Colorado has accused an online-only pastor of not only shepherding his flock, but also fleecing them, of more than three million dollars. That’s how much he sold in cryptocurrency the Commissioner claims was worthless.
Don’t ask me how hundreds of people invested their money with a guy who doesn’t even own a real pulpit, but evangelical Christians put a lot of faith in, well, faith.
The pastor had told his flock that “the Lord brought this cryptocurrency to me. He said ‘Take this to my people for a wealth transfer.’”
Me, I’m pretty sure God doesn’t talk like that.
After the Commissioner filed the complaint in the Denver County district court, the pastor walked his story back a little bit, saying it’s possible “I misheard God.”
Now, I know God mumbles — she’s mumbled a few things to me I could never figure out — so it’s possible he misunderstood part of the conversation. But he says he even argued with God.
“Lord,” he said, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have any experience in this industry. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to be caught up in something.”
Thereby setting up another defense, one that may never have been tried before in any court.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
It’s about a ten-hour drive from where I live in Boulder, Colorado, to Nowhere, Oklahoma, where practically no one lives. Upside: not much crime; only two cops, and they’re in the next town over, Fort Cobb.
To get there, I just have to start north on Gillaspie Drive, then wend my way six hundred forty-nine miles to the intersection of county roads 1280 and 2550, and there it is five hundred feet on my left.
But why drive when you can write? I tried, and you’ve probably already guessed what someone there had to say.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A judge in my neighborhood has ruled that a man who can’t stop lying about his weight (and almost anything else you can think of) did indeed incite, and engage in, an insurrection against the United States while he was its president, and ought to be given a chance to do it again.
Though the ruling is being appealed, it means I get yet another chance to vote against Donald Trump, so I’m pretty happy about that.
It’s a mite peculiar, though, that she hung her judge’s robe on a determination that the orange blob was never an officer of the United States, and so under the Fourteenth Amendment isn’t qualified to be disqualified from holding office again. Perhaps she meant, never was qualified to hold office in the first place.
The Supreme Court said, in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731 (1982): “Article II, § 1, of the Constitution provides that ‘[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States. . . .’ This grant of authority establishes the President as the chief constitutional officer of the Executive Branch.”
Also, in February 2020, The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in K&D LLC v. Trump Old Post Office, LLC, 951 F. 3d 503, concluded, at President Trump’s request, that the U.S. President is a federal officer, when they wrote: “President Trump removed the suit to federal court under the federal officer removal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1442(a)(1).” The former big guy doesn’t remember that, of course.
“Commander-in-Chief” sure sounds like some kind of officer.
The legal dictionary I use says a federal officer is anyone elected or appointed to an office in the federal government. I’m pretty sure they mean the government of the United States.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
It’s a sort of national disgrace that a code of conduct for the highest court in the United States should have fewer teeth than even its lowest courts. And by fewer, I mean, none.
The canons devised by the Supreme Court are a little akin to a visit to a dentist for a cleaning but when you come home you have nothing left with which to chew your food.
It took two hundred thirty-four years for the Court to devise any ethics code at all, and the result of all those years of contemplation was essentially to steal the existing code of conduct for all other United States judges, with the exception of one word: “shall.”
Wherever that word is used in the lower courts code, the Supremes substitute a wiggle word: “should.”
So for example where a lower court judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” a Supreme Court justice “should” do that, but doesn’t have to.
Where the less exalted judge must disqualify for personal bias or prejudice, the Supreme Court justice doesn’t have to.
Where the ordinary judge’s spouse, or minor child still living at home, has an interest in a matter before the court, that judge must recuse from the case, but not the Supreme Court Justice.
The new high court ethics code grandfathers, or grandmothers, or grandparents in any Justice who has already embarrassed the Court with any unseemly conduct, but with no “have-to’s” involved it doesn’t really matter.
So undisclosed expensive gifts from billionaires with business before the court may remain embarrassments, but no cause for concern.
The whole need for a Supreme Court code of conduct, the Justices maintain in a Statement of the Court at the very beginning of their wiggly fifteen-page document, is “the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
And so it’s all a misunderstanding. Right.
Before any sense of renewed respect for one of America’s highest institutions can be restored, the Justices are gonna need to work on something else.
