I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I suppose it’s funny that on Independence Day, I would feel the need to reach out to someone, more than usual. But since Vietnam, I’ve always been a little embarrassed come Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, even the Fourth of July.
Many of us don’t want to be thanked for the evil we did there, and in Cambodia, and in Laos. We didn’t plan to do evil, didn’t want to do evil, but our government surely did. We dropped our bombs mostly on civilians. More than forty years after we dropped our last bombs, we’re still killing them, from unexploded ordnance touched off, often, by children.
There is hardly a day I don’t think of the young men I knew who flew those missions, of one young Mormon man in particular who was convinced the magic underwear he wore would spare him harm. Whoever embroidered his garment must have been a nonbeliever.
I’m grateful for their service, all of them, and bitter for the people they served. I’m downright hateful toward the men (there probably weren’t many women to get all riled up about, then) who felt the lives of American boys and girls were a fair trade for their political and financial advancement. I doubt they gave a thought to the uncounted nonAmerican boys and girls they murdered.
Words like that probably qualify me for somebody’s enemies list. I don’t mind much. I’m pretty sure I’ve been on lists like that before.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The Supreme Court giveth, the Supreme Court taketh away.
A few days ago the United States Supreme Court decided that if you’re so revolting a human as to be homosexual, you probably still ought to be able to marry whomever you want, even if it’s another faggot or dyke. It was a 5-4 decision.
(Moments earlier the court ruled, by a much clearer 6-3, that queer folk have the right to breathe the same air as the rest of us, as long as they don’t exhale in our general direction.)
This morning, in another 5-4 squeaker, the Court decided it’s okay to execute people by excruciating means because the convicts waiting on deck for their turn at lethal injection failed to show the Court a less excruciating means to kill them.
Oh, the humanity.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who considers himself the smartest of the nine justices, and maybe actually is, blasted the Court for finding a fundamental right — to marry the grownup person of your choice who chooses you back — within its interpretation of the Constitution. Scalia said you might as well find a fundamental right to marry the several persons of your choice; he may be on to something.
Scalia further found the decision a “threat to American democracy.” It’s up to the people to decide who counts as a full human being, and none of the Court’s business. You know, like it’s up to the people to decide who should be slaves (the Constitution pretty specifically defined a black guy as only three-fifths of a white guy), who should get to vote, who should get the best education, who should control a woman’s body (and a man’s, for that matter). Just one more example of the judiciary interfering with the legislatures’ rights to fascist behavior.
Scalia was careful, right from the get-go of his opinion, to emphasize that it was no skin off his nose if a man marries a man, or a woman a woman.
“The substance of today’s decree,” he wrote, “is not of immense personal importance to me.” No, he continued, “(t)he law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes.” So just as the law may recognize same-sex marriage, it could also recognize a person’s right to marry their pet pig. Just not on Scalia’s watch. He doesn’t think he should decide such things, and in his case I’m inclined to agree with him.
Scalia also had a lot to say in the death penalty case decided today. Even the name of the case echoes the disgusting nature of American death penalty jurisprudence: Glossip v. Gross.
Oklahoma death row inmates filed this suit, not surprisingly after two of them were executed in grisly fashion which I wrote about here. After pesky anti-death penalty advocates somehow “pressured” pharmaceutical companies to stop providing two different drugs that supposedly caused too much pain, Oklahoma managed to find a third drug just as effective, though involving more screaming.
The Court seemed to be saying, you had these two other drugs, you didn’t like them, you haven’t got a better alternative, you got what you deserve.
The majority opinion capsulized the history of this country’s attempts to make execution humane, almost as though such a thing is possible.
Hanging was the preferred method of humane execution till about 1890. People literally lost their heads, or strangled an inordinate time; faces swelled, tongues protruded, eyes popped, there was shit everywhere, and all that jerky dancing went on way past giggling. Not humane enough.
Then came electrocution. Are you kidding me? Blindfolded bald guys strapped to a chair and slathered with conductive jelly, then hit with enough current to light up the small town where they were born. Bones dislocated and broken against the straps, everything swells to popping, same old shit and piss, the sound of bacon frying, sometimes he or she explodes in flame. Even the coroner is inconvenienced till the body cools enough to inspect the cooked brains. Still not quite humane.
Next up, cyanide, the kind that killed a cousin of mine. Breathe deeply, gents, the condemned are told, and it’ll go better for you. Who does that? So, extreme horror, extreme pain, unfortunate memories of all those gassed Jews. Not there yet.
Firing squad: “let’s do it” when slightly paraphrased became a nice slogan for a running shoe company.
Which brings us up to date, with lethal injection, Oklahoma ironically or not being the first state to try it on for size and still struggling to make it fit.
Justice Scalia wrote a corrosive concurring opinion to keep Oklahoma in business, with Justice Thomas signing on just for fun. Scalia and Thomas have earlier written that it’s okay to inflict a lot of pain while weeding out the criminal population, as long as you don’t deliberately intend to do it. So when pain is just an accident or an unfortunate side effect of execution, the hangman is good to go.
Scalia, entertaining as almost ever, opens his opinion with, “Welcome to Groundhog Day,” and launches what he intends a humiliating attack on Justice Breyer for his judicial impertinence to suggest the death penalty be abolished altogether.
Groundhog Day, of course, was a movie about the same day being repeated over and over. Scalia slights the lawyers of the condemned for repeatedly bringing these cases to the court, repeatedly losing, and repeatedly trying again. He doesn’t mention that this is real life, and maybe not as funny as the movie. Not funny to the condemned, of course, though in most cases probably they deserve a rotten death. But not to the lawyers, either, who may not be as comfortable as Scalia is that the United States executes people it later exonerates.
He calls the dissent a “vocal minority,” as though a swing vote is insignificant to outcome (would he say that if Clarence Thomas were a different kind of man?), and lampoons them as “waving over their heads a ream of the most recent abolitionist studies (a superabundant genre) as though they have discovered the lost folios of Shakespeare.”
Scalia refutes Breyer’s contention that eighteen years on average on death row is itself cruel and unusual by stating, correctly, that those years are the fault (though I like to say, to the credit) of the lawyers fighting the penalty. So kill ‘em quicker. Never mind it means more dead people later exonerated. Never mind it means the United States remains the most uncivilized civilized nation on Earth.
So, bring on the poison chemicals.
Until you show us something better, prisoners at the bar, this is the most humane method “known to human science.”
Maybe instead of looking for better science, we should look for better humans.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
There’s something about the Dakotas. Not the Manchester boys, whom we met briefly in 1963 and never gave a musical thought to since, but the states pegged squarely — rectangularly, really — in the north central United States of America.
They’re drowning in alcohol.
North and South Dakota are the number 1 and 2 likeliest places to be arrested for drunk driving. Stumbling in at number 3 is the state I call home: welcome to colorful and moistly convivial Colorado.
This was pointed out to me, and a saloonful of others of his colleagues, by Gary Pirosko, one of Colorado’s finest DUI lawyers, who knows a thing or two about it. This was pointed out to him by Project Know, dedicated to the sober life. This was pointed out to them by the Federal Bureau of Intoxication (mostly just called the FBI). The full Project Know study is here.
The FBI says there are more than a million DUI arrests every year in the U.S. Factoring in the crime-stopping capabilities of law enforcement, that means there are almost exactly one billion drunk drivers on the road.
I’ve never been to the Dakotas, so I turned to Wikipedia for clues as to why those two states are purportedly the most inebriated. I found two. That source helpfully and immediately points out that “The Dakotas” are not to be confused with “The Dakota,” a much ritzier living space in New York City.
So far, so good.
The other clue was that nearly half the people who live there are of German ancestry. Germany lost a lot of world wars.
Project Know also looked at some of our big cities, with interesting results. Chicago, a bootlegger’s paradise during Prohibition, racked up more than five thousand DUI arrests in barely a year. Portland: three thousand, three hundred thirty-five in two years. Denver: two thousand, one hundred twenty-eight in almost three years. Kansas City: nine hundred thirty-two in ten months. Seattle, where by God it rains a lot: five thousand four hundred thirty-nine in not even two years. San Francisco, where people leave their hearts and other contents of their bodies on barroom floors with some regularity: two thousand five hundred ninety-four in almost five years.
The big city that gave Project Know the most pause, though, was Boston — not because there were so many DUI arrests, but so few: an average of only two hundred sixty-four a year. But I think I know why. I lived in Boston for many years, and in my memory of their fitness level, the average Boston policeman couldn’t catch a drunken pedestrian.
Alabama has by far the lowest number of drunk driving arrests in the nation. However, I’m not sure it’s totally illegal to drive drunk there.
And my home state? Why are we number 3?
Beyond competitive nature, there’s no explaining Colorado.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The other day I was looking for a criminal defense lawyer in Nauru who might contribute to the newsletter associated with this blog, “Drunk & Disorderly.” I didn’t find any.
Turns out it’s hard to find a criminal defense lawyer of any sort on this South Pacific island-state. There really aren’t any. Which makes it tough when about one of every nine of the third-smallest-country-in-the-world’s residents is locked up in a detention center. Tough to ever get out of there.
The prison holds about a thousand refugees caught trying to sneak into a much larger island nation — Australia. Australia pays the Nauru government for warehousing the men, women, and children who Australia would otherwise have to imprison on its own shores, two thousand six hundred miles to the southwest, while processing their asylum applications. Always a good idea to keep people, as mistreated as these people allege they are, as far offshore as possible. Child rape, suicide, and beatings play poorly to the onshore press.
Australian legislators this month are scrambling to pass laws that say the foreign detention centers in Nauru and elsewhere are legal, Human rights meddlers brought these conditions to light, and now are suing the government for locking people up in a foreign country in the first place.
The Australian Human Rights Commission conducted a national inquiry into children in immigration detention, and released its results late last year. They called it, “The Forgotten Children.”
“No other country,” they said, “mandates the closed and indefinite detention of children when they arrive on our shores.” They continued, “Unlike all other common law countries, Australia has no constitutional or legislative Bill of Rights to enable our courts to protect children.”
Some of their findings:
Children at Nauru have significantly higher rates of mental illness.
Their right to education is denied, on average, for more than a year.
The government has failed to act in the children’s best interests.
Children are subjected to physical and sexual assault so frequently that some, like the sixteen-year-old girl who threw herself off a balcony, resort to self-harm.
Dozens of children with physical and mental disabilities are detained for years without hope of release.
The levels of physical, emotional, psychological, and developmental distress are extreme.
The government generally has violated their human rights.
The government responded by doing what government does second-best — first-best is its ability to convince voters that campaign contributions and bribes are different things — and demonized the messenger. It “lost confidence” in the Human Rights Commission, fired its president, and now is shoring up the legality of what it is doing.
Among the commission exhibits was this, from a 17-year-old who should have been graduating from high school somewhere:
Dear Bird Send My Message
Send my humble greetings and love to people
who are struggling days and night,
who are in every street protesting,
who are moving earth and heaven just to help us.
Dear bird send my message.
Send an image of my eyes- to Abbott*-
where tears are rolling like a river,
send my heart full of sorrow,
send my mind full of thoughts,
send him images of why I came.
Dear bird send my message.
Send my emotions to Morrison**
who is enjoying my pain,
who does not think that I am a human being like him,
who thinks that i am just a number the waste of population.
Dear bird send my message.
Send my appreciation and gratitude to lawyers
who fight for my freedom,
who give me hope that someday I will be able to sleep.
* John “Tony” Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia
** Scott Morrison, then Australia’s Immigration Minister
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
My grandmother was Ethel Clemens, and used to speak from time to time of her uncle, Sam. Uncle Sam was a prolific writer, of letters and such. Sometimes he’d write a line or two that seemed worth saving. Some bore at least faint reference to the criminal law, a subject with which a criminal defense lawyer ought to have a passing acquaintance.
Here are a few:
On Aliases
…although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted.
How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind? This is a great mystery.
On Burglars
Sam’s own house was burgled, and he wrote to a friend, “We are buying a couple of bulldogs & hoping they will call again.” They did call again:
Those poor burglars have gone to jail. I haven’t anything against them, I bear them no malice & put no blame upon them, for it is only circumstances & environment that make burglars, therefore anybody is liable to be one. I don’t quite know how I have managed to escape myself.
On Crime
As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime, you learn real morals. Commit all the crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by-and-by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.
On Evil
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
On Good
…there’s a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody. You’ll be a long time finding it, sometimes.
On Jail
…every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten that dog.
On Juries
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.
On Justice
…like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain’s affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but whenever I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors I would drown him.
On Killing
Sam described the noble goals “of the five or six high civilizations”:
They all did their best — to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history — but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian — not to acquire his religion, but his guns.
On Law
If we only had some God in the country’s laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
On Lawmakers
I think I can say, and say with pride that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.
On Police
Sam once tried to break up a fight on the street he and a friend witnessed. Cops, like military, enjoy a long tradition of letting God sort ’em out, so just naturally everyone landed in jail.
I have been in the Station House. I staid there all night. I don’t mind mentioning it, because anybody can get into the Station House here without committing an offence of any kind. And so he can anywhere that policemen are allowed to cumber the earth. I complimented this police force in a letter some time ago, and felt like a guilty, degraded wretch when I was doing it, and now I am glad I got into the Station House, because it will teach me never to so far forget all moral principle as to compliment a police force again.
On Prejudice
I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being — that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
On Robbery
A robber is much more high-toned than what a pirate is — as a general thing. In most countries they’re awful high up in the nobility — dukes and such.
On Rules
It is good to obey all the rules when you’re young, so you’ll have the strength to break them when you’re old.
On Violence
…we build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.
And On War, the Greatest Crime
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out, as the Hessians did in our Revolution, and as the boyish Prince Napoleon did in the Zulu war, and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.
Man is the only animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country — takes possession of it and drives him out of it or destroys him. Man has done this in all the ages. There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by force and bloodshed.
Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day he is always some man’s slave for wages, and does that man’s work; and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who exclusively do their own work and provide their own living.
Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people’s countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” — with his mouth.
[Editor’s Note: My thanks to twainquotes.com and of course to Uncle Sam.]
