I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I love the Pope.
I love the possibilities of what a Pope might mean for the world.
John XXIII, John Kennedy’s Pope, the Pope of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope of “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.” Pope John died the same year Kennedy died, the same year Camelot died.
John Paul II, the Singing Pope, the Pope of reconciliation with Judaism, Islam, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. But like the man I interviewed said, when the Pope came to Boston in 1979, and The Singing Pope’s CDs were jumping off the shelves, “Look, I love the Pope. But I gotta tell you: he ain’t no Frankie Sinatra.”
And now Francis, the one and only, the Pope of nightclub bouncers, Jesuits, and Jesuit nightclub bouncers, first Pope from south of the border, first Pope who isn’t also a European in nearly thirteen hundred years.
Not the first Pope to take a serious misstep on behalf of religion.
Pope Francis says that while it was an aberration to kill a dozen folks at the offices of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, those folks really oughtn’t to have insulted the faith of their murderers. Even if the first person killed was a maintenance man who couldn’t have drawn an image of Muhammad to save his life, which of course didn’t save his life anyway.
But to certain of the faithful, how do you not insult their faith, if you are of a different faith? My mother was a Texas baptist for forty-one years before a deathbed Catholic conversion. The good people of her former church told my brother, who was eleven at the time, he’d better hurry on up and get baptized, because his mother was burning in hell for what she did.
I always liked what the Dalai Lama says about the certainty of faith, which is that there is no certainty. He’s been studying and practicing his religion all his life (or most of his countless lives, from his point of view), yet when asked about the certainty of his knowledge will reply, “I don’t know.”
It’s a lot harder to kill an unbeliever when you don’t know for sure yourself.
It’s easy to criticize the Pope for essentially implying that the people who worked at Charlie Hebdo had it coming. Of course it’s madness to justify the murder of someone who makes fun of your religion. It’s the madness of knowing. Knowing that you possess the one true faith.
If you know, know that the unbeliever, like my Texas mama and (maybe) everyone at Charlie Hebdo, is going to burn in hell for eternity, it makes virtually no difference if you kill every one of them. The average lifespan on this earth is sixty-eight years. What are sixty-eight years, or one hundred sixty-eight years, to eternity? I would imagine just a few days of burning in hell will make you forget everything that came before.
There is a cure to this madness. The cure is caring more for every creature struggling to know, than caring for the knowledge itself. It’s the struggle that’s worthy of our love, not the end of struggle. Nobody loves a know-it-all.
France has declared war on radical Islam, as though the seventeen deaths there suddenly awakened a nation fairly immune to the two thousand nine hundred ninety-six deaths thirteen years before, when the United States declared its own war. I would rather both nations had declared peace, and by that I don’t mean love or forgive the terrorists. Of course they should be brought to justice. But which justice?
These declarations of war, against people who reside within every nation on earth, obscures the view that this is not a military issue, but rather a criminal justice issue, important to people of all faiths and none.
People of faith, and people of no faith, can hate each other, be slaves to everlasting war. Or we can declare instead, I don’t know, and be free.
Je suis Charlie, je suis Juif, je suis catholique, je suis Baptiste, je suis bouddhiste, je suis musulman.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Sometimes Santa Claus comes to town in a three-piece suit.
Last month an Oklahoma lawyer wrote about the Artesia immigration detention center in New Mexico, which closed just after Christmas.
An immigration law firm in my neck of the woods, Kolko & Associates, traversed afar to Artesia a couple weeks before the holiday. These lawyers bore the gifts of the magi with them, representing for free fourteen families trying to bond out of imprisonment to spend the holiday outside the barbed wire.
The four wise men and women were David Kolko, Jennifer Casey, Bryon M. Large, and Jessica Bunnell. They wrapped their gifts in the tools of their trade — words — and delivered them fifteen days before the date many people celebrate as the birth of another immigrant.
All fourteen families were reunited, for at least this Christmas, this new year, this celebration.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
When I was growing up, one of my favorite TV shows was “I Spy.” Robert Culp was Kelly, whose cover was international tennis star; Bill Cosby, his trainer Scotty. A white kid, I wanted to be Scotty.
Scotty was a man of great dignity who didn’t smoke or drink, a Rhodes Scholar. Not like the black stereotypes I knew then: Stepin Fetchit, Amos ’n’ Andy, Eddie Anderson (“Rochester” on “The Jack Benny Program,” or even Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. He was kind and self-sacrificing. He had indomitable courage.
Or maybe I wanted to be Bill. It was hard to tell them apart, just as many people still have trouble telling apart Cosby from Dr. Cliff Huxtable, the wonderful husband and father he played on “The Cosby Show” two decades later.
Scotty and Bill had much in common. Both started out as a child, in North Philadelphia. Both of their mothers were maids. Both had absentee fathers who served in the Navy. Both followed their fathers into the Navy. Both were scholars and athletes at Temple University.
Only one has been accused of serial rape.
I can’t say I was disappointed in Bill Cosby. Not when the reports started to dribble in like a faucet leak over the past decade, then like a flood in the past month or so.
I already knew he was a monster. He had raped my friend, many years before. Drugged her, like he was supposed to have drugged the other women who have come forward, told their stories, been called liars and worse. For complicated reasons, I made her a promise not to tell anyone, not to go after him, in print or in anger.
A half-dozen years ago, I warned the woman who cleans our house about Bill Cosby. She was so proud that her daughter was going to Temple University, and told me how excited her beautiful child was that she was going to meet this great man. Great men have great secrets, I told her, sometimes the kind you don’t want your daughter discovering in a room alone with them.
My own father had secrets, or thought he did. The man who married my final stepmother was not the man who fathered his children. Not to her, he could not be that to her. The man who married Camille Cosby — who sees her husband as the victim of these stories — is not the man who raped my friend.
We think we know those closest to us, and sometimes we do. (It’s a little irritating how much my wife knows me: makes it hard to win arguments, brazen out moments of assholiness. She’s told me she wishes I wouldn’t always say what I’m actually thinking. At least not to the kids, friends, total strangers.)
But sometimes — maybe most times — we don’t know them.
I still want to be Scotty. I just don’t want to be Bill.
Four hundred ninety-nine pages detail that fall. That’s just the executive summary; the government won’t let you read some six thousand five hundred pages more for fear you might use them to start a fire to burn down Washington.
United States Senator John McCain — whose body and mind was forged in torture in Vietnam — said CIA torture interrogations “actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.”
“It’s about us,” he said, “what we were, what we are, and what we should be, and that’s a nation that does not engage in these kinds of violations of the fundamental basic human rights that we guaranteed when we declared our independence.”
These were the key findings:
Torture doesn’t work.
The CIA used torture because it mistakenly believed torture does work.
The torture was far worse than the CIA let on.
Conditions of confinement were worse than the CIA told policymakers.
The CIA lied to the Department of Justice so it couldn’t properly analyze the torture program.
The CIA would rather not be supervised by Congress.
The CIA would rather not be supervised by the White House.
The CIA would rather not cooperate with the FBI, the State Department, or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The CIA would rather not be supervised by its own Office of Inspector General.
The CIA told lies to the media about what it was doing, but that was okay because they were telling the same lies to Congress, the Department of Justice, and the President..
The CIA didn’t know what to do with the suspected terrorists it captured, and had no plan to ever turn them loose if it discovered it was wrong.
The CIA put people in charge of torture interrogations who had no idea what they were doing.
The CIA torture interrogation program was designed by two Air Force guys who had no experience in interrogation, had barely heard of al-Qa’ida, and whose knowledge of the language and culture was confined basically to belly dancers.
CIA detainees were tortured by means not only unapproved by the Department of Justice, but unauthorized by the CIA.
The CIA was never sure just how many people it detained, why they were detained, or what happened to them.
The CIA never tried to find out if torture was actually working.
The CIA rarely reprimanded or in any way held accountable torturers who might have gone a little over the top.
Criticisms, critiques, and objections about the torture interrogations, even from within the CIA, were like water running off a duck.
The CIA torture interrogation program essentially collapsed under its own weight when other countries tired of hosting torture sites and started blabbing about it. All but one country, whose name is still classified (but you probably wouldn’t want to live there), bailed on the program.
The CIA torture program damaged U.S. standing in the world, created tensions with U.S. partners and allies, and screwed up bilateral intelligence relationships.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A reasonable person could conclude that the officer who shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, should not have been indicted by the grand jury there. I am not that reasonable person, but a reasonable person could do that. The few who witnessed that killing were all black people, and why should jurors believe black people.
No person of any color could reasonably say the same about the policeman who choked Eric Garner to death in New York City last summer, or the policeman who shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice to death in Cleveland last month. Daniel Pantaleo and Timothy Loehmann committed their crimes on video, for all to see.
Here is what we see, what we hear, if we are the grand jurors who don’t indict the white cop who killed this giant forty-three-year-old black man.
And for most of us he is a giant — six feet, three inches, three hundred fifty pounds — a giant we surely would run from should he come at us threateningly. But he isn’t threatening: he’s backed against a storefront, surrounded by five armed policemen.
He’s hot; he’s sweating. He’s just broken up a fight. The other men have left, but the cops who arrive recognize Garner. He’s sold black market cigarets before, cutting out the taxman. Maybe he’s doing it now.
“I did not sell nothin’” Garner says, exacerbated. “I’m minding my business, officer. Please just leave me alone.” No one says, “You’re under arrest.” No one says, “Assume the position.” Two of the officers move close to Garner. Pantaleo comes from behind, throws his left arm around Garner’s fat neck in a chokehold, squeezing the vise, cutting blood and air. The chokehold was banned by the NYPD more than twenty years ago; it was the first tactic Pantaleo used to control Garmer.
Two other officers rush in to bring Garner down. Pantaleo rides Garner’s back, held tight in place by the relentless chokehold.
They roll Garner over onto his stomach; Pantaleo releases the chokehold, pushes Garner’s head against the concrete, holds it there, leaning into it.
“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” Garner whimpers, over and over and over, by one count eleven times, weaker each time, the last barely audible, and dies. There is no mistaking it: the man is now dead. Were he alive, his great chest and belly would be heaving, struggling to take air. He is still. The stillness of the dead.
And the police, and the paramedics who arrive, know it. They know the dead. But they pretend he is still alive. The people on the sidewalk must not be told a man has been killed before their eyes. So the police pat the dead man encouragingly, the paramedic talks to the corpse. Other police move the crowd back. One cop says, “Would you back up please, try to give him some air?” They’ve already taken his air. To his credit, the cop knows it, and looks deflated. They didn’t mean to kill him. They’ve already checked his pulse, and check it several more times; it isn’t coming back.
Pantaleo stands off from the body, looks into the camera, and waves cheerily. Maybe he’s already disconnecting from the reality of what he’s done; maybe he doesn’t give a damn.
We’ll probably never know. The grand jury which has seen this video, has heard a different narrative, and doesn’t indict. Grand juries are led by prosecutors, step by step, toward indictments. Prosecutors aren’t on a search for the truth when they convene grand juries. They’re on a mission to indict. They present only those facts, only that testimony, that leads, step by step, to indictment. That’s the meaning of the old saying, that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. This prosecutor didn’t want to indict this ham sandwich. And so this prosecutor presented the evidence the way a defense attorney would have it in his dreams: in a light most favorable to the accused. In that light, this policeman walked.
Pantaleo committed homicide, but according to the grand jury and the prosecutor who acted instead to defend Pantaleo, it was a legal homicide. One of more than a hundred police killings every year that the FBI chooses to overlook in federal statistics. These deaths, mostly of men of one color or another other than white, don’t count.
One of those deaths is the subject of the other video I mentioned. Not the death of a black man, though the officer who shot him, saw him as a black man who needed killing. The video shows the police killing a boy not yet thirteen.
Tamir Rice’s crime was the crime of my own boyhood, the crime of my son’s boyhood, the crime of his friends’ boyhoods. I used to call it cops ’n’ robbers, after what I saw on TV. Maybe Tamir called it boys in the ‘hood, after what he saw on TV. It was the crime of being a boy.
I had a six-gun; Tamir, like my son and his friends, had an Airsoft gun, a toy that fires plastic BBs but looks like a real gun.
Last month Tamir took his Airsoft toy to the park.
The video shows him walking back and forth along the sidewalk, in front of a gazebo, where a man sits, watching. Tamir twirls the gun around his finger, points it off-camera, makes a snowball, lofts it splat on the sidewalk. Meanwhile the man in the gazebo calls the police, says a guy who is probably a kid has a gun that is probably fake and is pointing it at people.
Cleveland is probably not the place to make a call like that.
The United States Justice Department released a report today, following a two-year investigation, that excoriates Cleveland police for a pattern of excessive force. Pieces of the pattern:
Two years ago more than one hundred officers chased a black man and woman through the streets after their car backfired and one of the officers claimed police were fired upon. The cops went Bonnie and Clyde on the unarmed couple: thirteen of them fired one hundred thirty-seven shots at the car, killing them both. Each was shot more than twenty times.
Cops there like to shoot, or shoot at, people who pose no threat to anyone. A hostage escaping his captors, running to police for safety, was shot at twice by a sergeant who mistook him for one of the bad guys. The hostage was naked except for boxer shorts, and was saved only by the sergeant’s incompetence with his firearm.
Officers like to hit people upside the head with their guns. One off-duty cop in civilian clothes drew his weapon on men who thought he was robbing them, and when one of the men insisted on seeing a badge, the cop hit him alongside the head with the gun, which went off and grazed the man’s skull.
Officers routinely hit and kick helpless suspects, and tase and mace others. They especially appear to enjoy using Tasers and mace against the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, and people in medical crisis. The report describes one captured suspect, prone on his stomach with arms and legs spread, surrounded by officers kicking and punching the man. In another case, a thirteen-year-old shoplifter, handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car, kicked at the door, which struck an officer in the leg. The six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound offended officer opened the door wide, sat on the five-foot-eight, one-hundred-fifty pound boy, and repeatedly punched his face bloody.
So, Cleveland police officers are used to dealing with children in ways that leave a lasting impression. It was certainly that way with Tamir. The police, who were pointedly informed by dispatch that the suspect was black, struck with breathtaking swiftness.
In the video again, Tamir now sits alone under the gazebo, the Airsoft gun tucked into the front of his pants and covered by his parka, when he looks to his left and sees a police car speeding right at him, off-road right onto the playground. He gets up and starts to walk toward it. He lifts the right side of his parka to show them his toy gun, still in his waistband, where it remains.
Officer Timothy Loehmann, encouraged to resign from another Ohio police department two years earlier because “(h)e could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” opens his passenger side door with his own real gun already drawn and unhesitatingly fires twice from six feet away, hitting Tamir once. Once was good.
How fast does this happen? Police admit to two seconds. It is less than two seconds. Officer Loehmann shoots Tamir and is already cowering behind the back of the patrol car before his partner can open his own door. Both men keep their pistols prudently trained on Tamir as he writhes on the ground, screaming. (There is no audio in the video, but unless you have the imagination of a clam, you can hear him screaming.) Neither man tries to help him.
Four minutes went by until another police car arrived, whose officers did try to help the boy before an ambulance appeared three minutes later to take him to the hospital, where Tamir died almost nine and a half hours later.
The Cuyahoga County medical examiner described Tamir’s appearance as “consistent with the reported age of 12 years.”
Loehmann and his partner said they thought he was twenty. A dirty black man no one wanted to touch. Not a boy, his intestines shredded by a metal-jacketed police bullet, bleeding out on a playground. Not a boy whose mother was but blocks away waiting, waiting for her dear child to come home to dinner. Waiting, now, forever.
