I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Author Sam Harris didn’t exactly send this letter, linked below, specifically to me. He sent it to a lot of people, people who were stunned at the Hamas military invasion to kill and kidnap hundreds of Israeli civilians, people stunned at the thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, and still being killed, in the Israeli response to destroy Hamas.
Some of these stunned people are — openly, guardedly, perhaps only subconsciously — anti-Palestinian.
Some are — openly, guardedly, perhaps only subconsciously — antisemitic.
Some see no difference between military action that targets civilians, and military action that results in civilian deaths and injuries.
Sam, whose education is in neuroscience and philosophy, appears to see some difference. Maybe you will too, here.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Things come in threes.
Three stories this month about cops killing or gravely wounding suspects who were no threat to the officers or anyone else, and in one case in my own neck of the woods may have saved the life of the cop who killed him.
Many will assume evil officer intent. Sometimes that’s true. Most cases, I think it’s something else.
Yesterday two Chicago policemen who shot an unarmed man, and some poor innocent who just happened to be walking by, were acquitted by a judge of various misconduct charges. The judge found it “within reason” that the man armed with a wine bottle and cell phone was shot three times (twice in the back), and a strolling bystander shot once, “under these particular circumstances.”
“These particular circumstances” included that the policemen worked in an accident investigation unit (not a crime unit), stopped to investigate a few folks loitering in front of a closed store (not an accident) — one of whom, a teen who did have a gun but turned away from the officers to flee — and the officers opened fire not just at the teen, but everyone. The teen did turn and return fire, but hit no one, probably because he had no firearms training, which may have been only slightly less than what the policemen had.
The officers were on their way to the police academy, for training, when they stopped at the scene of the non-accident. Pity they never got there.
Three days before that decision, a Philadelphia judge dismissed all charges, including murder, against a policeman there who shot through a fully closed car window during a traffic stop and killed a man on the other side holding a knife. Shot him six times. The officer testified he thought his partner warned him about a gun, though the partner testified he warned about a knife, and the initial police version was that the driver had lunged with the knife at the cop, whose own body camera footage showed that wasn’t true.
The judge said the shooting was justified because the officer was reacting out of fear for his safety. It probably is true that an undertrained officer is more afraid in almost any situation than a well-trained one.
The man who died a couple of years ago in my state was almost certainly better trained than the officer who killed him, the officer whose life it was possible he had just saved. The dead man had trained for nearly a year with the handgun he had bought with the intention that someday he might stop a mass shooter. The day he died he did that. He stopped a man who had just killed a police officer and had the intention to kill as many more as he could. He stood in front of a man armed with an AR-15, steadied his handgun, and stopped him.
As he was disarming, on his knees, the would-be mass murderer’s weapon, he didn’t know that another police officer stood seventy-five feet behind him, deciding whether to warn him first or just shoot him. Didn’t know the officer feared he could be a second shooter. Didn’t know the officer also feared his training wasn’t enough to assure him he could hit a man turning on him with an AR-15 from less than the distance between home plate and first base.
So the last thing the man heard was the three bullets the officer fired at him, the last thing he felt the one that hit him in the back.
I write about it today because the man’s still grieving mother won a lawsuit yesterday against the police department. The $2.8 million settlement probably won’t settle her grief anytime soon.
You don’t spray a group of people with gunfire because one of them is running away.
You don’t shoot a man holding a knife on the other side of a closed car window.
You don’t shoot a man in the back without warning, who you don’t know whether he just shot your friend or just saved your life.
I don’t know that these cops needed to be sent to jail. They sure as hell needed to be sent back to school.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I think men in general have lost the right to define sexual freedom, so I won’t try to tell you what it is.
I will tell you what I think it is not.
I think it is not the right of a soccer federation president to kiss a member of the women’s team who just brought a World Cup victory to your country for the first time (the last time he’ll ever do that as an official of any sports organization).
I think it is not the right of a nation’s president to grab any woman, by any body part, ever, and in doing so over and over — and even fantasizing about his own daughter’s body parts — he richly deserved a federal judge calling him a rapist in fact and in deed.
It is not the right of an employer to pay a woman a salary different from what he would pay a man of similar qualification for the same work.
It is not the right of any politician or judge to deny women and often children access to reproductive health care and authority over their own bodies, lives, and futures.
It is not the right of anyone to decide that a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation must be regulated by historical, cultural, or Webster definitions.
It is not the right of the strong to dominate the weak.
And if you disagree, I do recognize your right to remain silent.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The most recently former president of the United States just painted a target on the rather broad chest of his own appointee chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Four-Star General Mark Milley needs a broad chest to display the thirty-three military awards (including four bronze stars) he’s earned.
Donald Trump, whose only military honor is the Order of the Bone Spur, was peeved because General Milley inexplicably chose loyalty to the United States Constitution over loyalty to the man who tried to burn it down.
When the still-President Trump staged an attempted coup against his own government on 6 January 2021 Milley, with the authorization of other presumably traitorous Trump administration officials, called China to assure those folks that sane minds still held checks on power in the United States (me, I’m not so sure) and nobody’s fingers would be anywhere near any nuclear buttons large or small.
A few days ago, Trump sounded the dog whistle to his followers (many of whom are nowhere near sane), writing that Milley’s was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” That was Trump spelling “death” out in all caps in case anyone had started to nod off at the end of his sentence.
Somebody might remind Trump — maybe using his own dog whistle — that those times have not gone by, that many believe that an attempted coup against a duly elected president is itself treason, and that the penalty for treason in this country today is still death.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Someone wrote the other day to ask why I never write about white-collar crime.
Partly it’s because I believe the old saw that it’s better to write what you know, and apart from a fair number of political candidates I don’t know any white collar criminals.
Another part is that, like most criminal defense lawyers, I wasn’t thinking about money when I got into the business. I was thinking about the kinds of things Jimmy Stewart or Gregory Peck were thinking about.
White-collar crime involves math: you got to figure out the numbers whenever anybody’s charged with stuff like fraud, embezzlement, bribery, insider trading. While I was pretty good with it up through my undergraduate years, I forgot so much I couldn’t even help my grade school kids.
The only math they teach in law school is how to divide by three or multiply by zero point four.
I do appreciate the claim that white-collar crime is nonviolent, though I imagine victims feel a fair bit of mental and emotional violence. A slap upside the head hurts, but a slap upside the wallet hurts longer.
So as far as writing about white-collar crime goes, I’m going to plead ineffective assistance of counsel. Someone out there who actually knows something about it, be happy to hear from you.
