Philip Rosmarin

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

I laughed when my mother died. Giggled, actually. I was thirteen and playing some stupid game when my uncle told me she was dead. It’s only now, as I write these words, that I realize it should have been my father to tell me she was dead.

Hearing me laugh, my mother’s brother-in-law said nothing, and began to get ready to drive us home. Shaving his face with an old strop razor, he looked down at me and said it was hard for a man to show he hurt; that he had lost his daddy when he was my age; that it was all right to cry if I wanted. I did cry then, and in that moment loved my uncle more than I had ever loved my father.

I had known she would die. I knew it when she told me she would get better, when she said we’d celebrate when she came back from the hospital. I knew there’d be no coming back, and though she asked me to stay, I went off anyway with my younger brother and sister to our aunt’s. I couldn’t bear to watch her die.

At her funeral, she was laid out in a cheap casket, her face painted like a harlot. I was afraid to look at her; my father said I must. People said she looked peaceful, calm, at rest. She didn’t look like that. She looked dead.

Last week there was another funeral, of another mother. I knew my wife’s mum in a way I didn’t have the time to know mine: as an adult I could appreciate her rowdy and magnificent past, and her rowdy and magnificent present. I will be with her family, my family, to celebrate this singular old sparkler who gave birth to my wife, and the sweet longing for reclaimed innocence to the author of Catcher in the Rye — she was his inspiration for his character, Esmé, a secret she kept out of loyalty to him for sixty years — at her memorial this summer.

But I didn’t want to go to her funeral. I wanted to remember the laughing, vital woman she was.

Because I was still afraid. Still that child, gazing on the rouged dead face of his mother.

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

Here’s one game you don’t play in (perhaps perfectly named) Lynchburg, Virginia.

Kayleb Moon-Robinson made the mistake of kicking a trash can in plain view of a sharp-eyed, though possibly dim-witted, police officer, who diligently filed a disorderly conduct charge, a misdemeanor, against him with the court.

He’s eleven. He’s black. He’s bad, according to the officer and principal of the school where Kayleb attends sixth grade, as pestilent a breeding ground for bad kids as ever was.

Barely had the ink dried on the police blotter before next thing you know Officer Friendly was arresting the black boy again, slamming him to the ground just so’s he’d stay put while slapping the cuffs on. He didn’t break a real law this time, but rather a special rule the school came up with to keep him in his place: he was always to be last of the kids to leave the room. Not exactly back of the bus; still, back of the class.

Realizing they ain’t supposed to have no Jim Crow laws no more, this fine officer improvised, charging Kayleb with felony assault against a police officer, because mayhap the officer pulled a muscle while slamming the little brat to the ground. He briefly considered charging destruction of school property, but talked himself out of it when he realized that, while the boy’s glasses were broken when the thinking man’s cop was forced to bodyslam him ON school property, the glasses themselves weren’t school property, not really. Although, that argument may be reserved later for some right-thinking district attorney.

I may have forgotten to mention that Kayleb lives with autism, a condition known to all the concerned officials, who said while he has special needs, he just needs to “man up.”

Kayleb may indeed someday man up as they are teaching him to do. Little boys sometimes grow into big boys. And while Virginia boasts eighty-nine thousand sheep, Kayleb might not be one of them.

[Editor’s Note: This story was sent by my sister from Redding, California, where when you walk down the street and pass ninety-nine people, the next one may be black if you look real quick.]

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

Had he lived, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be 133, and probably still President of the United States.

John Q. Barrett, who teaches criminal procedure at St. John’s University School of Law, is somewhat younger, very much alive, and responsible for one of the more penetrating biographies of Roosevelt. While gathering material to write a forthcoming biography of someone else — Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, a Roosevelt appointee to the Court — Barrett discovered in Jackson’s papers an unknown mémoire of his working relationship with Roosevelt dating from 1911.

Barrett edited the raw manuscript and turned it into That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The work has been called “admirable…even heroic,” “lively, revealing,” and “a rare and happy event.” In the interest of balance, one Amazon reader (that may be too strong a word) dinged it with one star because it didn’t have any pictures.

On this St. Patrick’s Day, Professor Barrett has been kind enough to share the story of another St. Patrick’s Day, seventy years removed, that also happened to be the occasion of Franklin and Eleanor’s fortieth wedding anniversary, which Justice Jackson (also a dear friend) helped them celebrate.

Please allow yourself the treat of reading it here.

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

So it wasn’t just that one uppity nigra boy got hisself shot caused all the trouble in Ferguson.

The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice has found that city’s police and courts systemically biased against black Americans. Killing one of them was the sincerest expression of that racial hatred — though not enough to indict the officer who really was only the instrument of city policy.

From 2012 to 2014, nearly ninety percent of documented use of force against Ferguson residents was against black people, who comprise sixty-seven percent of the town. Never mind undocumented force. Even the police dogs were trained to hate the blacks, and never met a black man they didn’t bite, and never met a white man they did bite.

It seems a white man almost couldn’t get arrested in Ferguson, where ninety-three percent of the arrests were of blacks.

The municipal court and city attorneys were no better: the courts were far more likely to dismiss cases against white folks than black; prosecutors offered better deals to whites, who were run through the system much faster.

Ferguson police routinely stopped black people without reasonable suspicion, arrested them without probable cause, and frequently insulted and physically abused their “suspects.” If you were black, you were a suspect. If you made a face at a cop and your face was black, you went to jail. It wasn’t clear that anybody in the Ferguson police department had the remotest familiarity with the United States Constitution.

The Ferguson court was much more interested in raising money for the town than in anything so sissified as justice or the rights of the accused. Again these fines fell hugely disproportionately on black people.

Racial bias was evident in official emails sent back and forth between the Ferguson police and courts. Very jolly they were too:

A November 2008 email stated that President Barack Obama would not be President for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

A March 2010 email mocked African Americans through speech and familial stereotypes, using a story involving child support. One line from the email read: “I be so glad that dis be my last child support payment! Month after month, year after year, all dose payments!”

An April 2011 email depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.

A May 2011 email stated: “An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received a check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.’”

A June 2011 email described a man seeking to obtain “welfare” for his dogs because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddies are.”

An October 2011 email included a photo of a bare-chested group of dancing women, apparently in Africa, with the caption, “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.”

A December 2011 email included jokes that are based on offensive stereotypes about Muslims.

Not only did no one in Ferguson government object to the emails, they were frequently forwarded to others so everyone could join the fun.

So pervasive was the rot in law enforcement, so decayed the foundation of the halls of justice in Ferguson, so betrayed the community trust in these institutions, the Justice Department called for a complete abandonment of current policies and practices, and a total overhaul of the justice system in that city.

The effect of the Justice Department findings was that the white officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teen in the dying days of last summer could not be held criminally responsible for what he did. Darren Wilson did not murder Michael Brown, the feds say.

Ferguson justice murdered him.

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

Jose Elena Rodriguez was sixteen years old when he was shot in the back of the head and killed while walking down the street of his hometown, Nogales, Mexico. One shot probably would have been enough, but to be sure, his assailants put nine more into his back. The bullets came from the United States. I don’t mean they were made in the United States: they were fired from the United States through a fence into Mexico, by Border Patrol agents.

There were seven more incidents like that in nine years, when U.S. agents fired across the border into Mexico, killing people they said threw rocks at them.

The Border Patrol agent who shot Gabriel Sanchez Velasquez had the decency to kill him face to face. He said Sanchez Velasquez was grabbing for his gun and he had no choice. Sanchez Velasquez may have been on his knees begging for his life: The Pima County, Arizona, medical examiner said the man was shot from above at an “indeterminate/distant range.”

Forty-four other human beings were exterminated by border agents between 19 February 2005 and 18 February 2014, according to an investigation by The Arizona Republic. Sure, that’s only about five killings a year, and most of them were Mexicans. But it also includes thirteen U.S. citizens, a Border Patrol agent killed by “friendly fire” in an incident that involved only border patrol agents, and a twelve-year-old girl (oh wait…she was Mexican).

None of the border agents was ever indicted, or disciplined.

Things have improved since the Republic’s investigation: agents aren’t supposed to shoot anymore at moving cars that don’t pose a deadly threat; not supposed to move into the path of a car so they have to shoot or be run over; and try like the dickens not to shoot people throwing rocks when the agents have some other choice not involving killing folks.

Someone asked me the other day if I thought Ferguson might be just an aberration. You know, like New York, Cleveland, Phoenix, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Iberia Parish, Houston, Santa Rosa, Washington, Austin, Jonesboro, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Pasadena, Chicago, New Orleans, Gainesville, Dayton, Galveston, Orange County, White Plains, Denver, San Francisco, Oakland, Detroit, Portland, Champaign, Pensacola, Cincinnati, Fairfax County.

All those aberrations.