Philip Rosmarin

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

Headline today on a breaking news alert from the New York Times:

Police Shooting of Unarmed Brooklyn Man Appears to Have Been Accident, City Says

Damn! They usually do these things on purpose!

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

The Ebola crisis this November brings to mind another November, and another disease to which the initial response was apathy, when Magic Johnson went on network television to announce that HIV/AIDS infected, and affected, more than just anonymous gay men. It infected beloved sports superstars with magnetic smiles, affected all who knew them, or felt as if they knew them through their celebrity.

HIV/AIDS took the rich and famous, too. Magic Johnson was special. Magic Johnson’s illness moved a nation.

Twenty-three years on, Magic Johnson is still alive. But for millions of others, it might have been better had he died. It might have been better were the disease not so heavily focused on men we felt were not really men, and among the poor of rural Africa, so far from our homeland, so far from our consciousness. Just like Ebola today, until it infected a handful of Westerners.

My name is not Magic.

My smile is not magnetic.

If I contract the AIDS virus, if I am a poor man in Sierra Leone and contract Ebola, my suffering will not move a nation. Why should it? The deaths of millions before me have not.

When Magic Johnson announced that he had AIDS, more than twice as many Americans had already died from the disease than died in Vietnam. Some of them must have been special. But almost all of them were gay.

So until Magic Johnson announced that he too had AIDS, it was impossible to identify anyone dead or dying of the disease who was held dear by the first Bush Administration. No one before had merited mention by the President of the United States. Just like Ebola today.

Why this was so was said best by Magic himself. If it could happen to Magic Johnson, it could happen to anybody. Here was the greatest basketball player of his time. He was not gay. He had not shared dirty needles. When it happened to Magic, the President of the United States (who was not unused to the metaphors of sport) recognized that it had happened to somebody.

The United States Administration had long acted as though AIDS was a disease that only happened to nobodies. Just like Ebola today.

Only gay people could get it. Gay people were not somebody. Only drug users could get it. Drug users didn’t count. Just like Ebola today, where poor West Africans are nobodies, and don’t count — until they touch an American.

At a terrible price to him, Magic Johnson forced the American government to confront a disease it had perceived happening only to those it did not care about. His generosity was to show openly that people it did care about could get AIDS too. Just like Ebola today.

When film director Tony Richardson, who left a large and honored body of work, died of AIDS one week after Magic Johnson’s announcement, there was no awestruck press conference. Tony Richardson was bisexual and became infected by having sex with a man.

When playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman, whose creative brilliance had barely dawned, lay blind in his bed at eighty pounds, his producer whispering “Hey Howard, Beauty and the Beast is going to be a great success; who’d have thought it?”, Ashman answering “I would have,” as he died of AIDS, there were no public moments of tortured silence. Howard Ashman was openly gay.

When my friend Kiefer, whose truly creative gifts were the loving vibrations he freely gave to all who knew him, died of AIDS the year before, President Bush did not appear on national television to say he had not done enough to help his kinder, gentler nation. Kiefer, also openly gay and with a heart so large he could love a man who did not physically love him back, did not count.

Nearly thirty-six million people on this dear earth are living with HIV/AIDS, four million of them children. That’s about the same number who have already been taken by the disease since the first cases were reported in 1981.

Most of these are in sub-Saharan Africa, a place that does not count. Just like Ebola today.

I don’t know that if a superstar basketball player, or a billionaire, or a President of the United States, had died of HIV/AIDS twenty-three years ago, the numbers would be different today. Yet I can’t help but think we would have tried harder. Maybe we’ll try harder, today, with Ebola. I hope it doesn’t take the deaths of too many more Americans. And, oh yes, Africans.

Until we are all treated as though each of our lives has worth, as though we all count, this dear earth will be a poor burial ground for us, neither kind nor gentle.

Only one of us will be called Magic.

But to those who love us, all our names are Magic.

To our children, all our smiles are magnetic.

[courtesy of The Alan Blueford Center For Justice]

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

A colleague reminded me that today is the 19th National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. They’re talking about my kids’ generation.

Every day since the first protest in 1996, all six thousand five hundred and seventy-five of them, should have been a day of protest against an entrenched brutality that deserves no place in a civilized nation.

My kids have seen police draw weapons on high school students suspected of having a drink at a party. My kids themselves have had weapons, including assault rifles, pointed at them by police. In my generation the toughest situation I faced with a police officer was when the guy was frisking me and I couldn’t stop jumping around I was so ticklish, and his rookie partner couldn’t stop laughing.

It’s been a long and ugly road to Ferguson.

Probably every criminal defense lawyer has had clients who were brutalized or humiliated by police, clients attacked in their own homes and then charged with assault on a police officer when they resisted the brutality.

Just a week ago, a federal jury awarded $4.6 million to the family of a street preacher who was killed in the booking room of the Denver jail in 2010. An old man, he was piled on by four deputies, handcuffed, choked out, tasered, and left for dead in a cell. I’m not saying they knew he was dead, I’m saying he was dead. The reason for the vigilante death penalty? He yanked his arm away when a fifth deputy had grabbed him unawares, from behind, the kind of thing anyone would do when grabbed from behind. They could have saved everybody the trouble and just shot him in the back.

None of the deputies was disciplined, not even docked in pay for the two minutes it took them to kill him. Par for the course for the Denver sheriff’s department, which had another three-point-something million dollar police brutality award against them this summer. Google “Denver police brutality,” and the Huffington Post, which covers news of national significance, ran twenty-six stories just from summer 2011 to summer 2013.

That’s a whole lot of beatin’ going on.

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

“John Doe” sits alone in a Pennsylvania jail cell day after day. He is accused of murdering a 90-year-old woman with his bare hands. The other day his jailers brought him something to kill the tedium of waiting for trial: a coloring book. He’s ten years old.

He’s being tried as if he were thirty.

That is, unless and until that state’s prosecutor comes to his or her senses, and moves the case into juvenile court where crayons and such are more the order of the day.

Yes, it’s a very serious crime (or at least, event — first they’ve got to prove it was a crime), and yes, it’s a very serious breach of civilized standards to haul a fifth grader into adult court, and jail him in a place where some inmates are dreaming of a prepubescent Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, does anybody seriously think competent to stand trial, a person who believes in a couple of months Santa Claus will be sliding down his chimney?

The kid could get life in prison, where presumably someone would break it to him that they don’t have accessible chimneys in prison.

It’s embarrassing but true: this kind of thing can only happen in America — oh, and Somalia, the other member of the United Nations that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. For some reason all the other countries think locking up a child for life is just no fair.

[Editor’s Note: Guest Blogger Lauren Witte is associate director of client services for the drug crime defense firm Jackson White in Mesa, Arizona. She writes with a particular courage from the battleground of Maricopa County, whose notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio likes to dress his inmates in pink panties, just so long as they’re men. I heard somewhere Joe favors the underdrawers because Mrs. Arpaio forbids that kind of thing around home.]

What is the Status of The War on Drugs?

In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, and law enforcement and prosecutors across the country began aggressively enforcing and punishing low-level drug crimes, particularly in neighborhoods of poor minorities. Since Nixon’s declaration, the prison population in the United States has risen by 700%.

According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, there were more African-American men in prison or “under the watch” of the justice system in 2011 than were enslaved in the U.S. in 1850. That is a shocking statistic, to say the least.

System of Racial and Social Control

Alexander explains, “…our criminal justice system now functions more like a system of racial and social control, than a system of crime prevention or control.” Though African-Americans reportedly make up only 12% of drug users in the U.S., 34% of those arrested for drug offenses in this country are black.

Who uses drugs more?

A study given by the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows that white students are using cocaine and heroin at a rate seven times higher than their African-American counterparts, and crack at a rate eight times higher.

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki reminds us of the common preconception that crack is a ‘black’ drug while cocaine is a ‘white’ one. This is not the case, says Jarecki. “The majority of crack users in the United States of America are and always have been white.”

Nonetheless, 80% of those sentenced under federal crack cocaine laws were African-Americans. According to the Sentencing Project, black Americans currently have a 20% higher chance of going to prison for a drug offense than whites, with Hispanics having a 40% higher chance.

Obama and the War on Drugs

Though Obama has been a vocal critic of our nation’s incarceration discrepancies between blacks and white for drug crimes, his administration continues to vilify even the most minor drug offenses.

In a report released in July of this year, officials from the Obama administration promised “to use evidence-based practices to combat drug abuse” in the United States. The report encouraged public education and health programs, better reentry programs, and more compassionate messaging, rather than increased prosecution.

If government officials really want to come off as more compassionate towards drug users, they have a long way to go. Who can forget the national ad campaign featuring erratic and horrific behavior with the tagline, “This is your brain on drugs”?

Marijuana vs. Other Drugs

Perhaps the most alarming hypocrisy by the Obama administration is the refusal by the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration to label marijuana as a less harmful drug than heroin, cocaine, or meth.

As opposed to meth, cocaine, and heroin, which contribute to thousands of deaths in this country every year, not a single person has ever fatally overdosed from marijuana.

Prohibition vs. Legalization

While Obama claims he is working to decriminalize drug addiction and label it instead as a disease, it’s pretty tough to decriminalize something that is, by definition, a crime. Violence related to drug prohibition causes thousands of deaths every year in the United States, not to mention those murdered in supplier nations like Afghanistan, Colombia, and Mexico.

Instead of moving towards more lenient penalties for low-level drug offenses, prosecutors in the U.S. continue to arrest and imprison, taking more workers from the economy and breaking up more families. Additionally, those arrested find it much harder to find employment with a criminal record.

Widespread legalization of every drug probably isn’t the answer, but working to decrease penalties and prison or jail sentences for minor drug offenses will point us in the right direction.

The First Step

So, before we can truly mend our nation’s trend of arresting and incarcerating countless men and women of color for minor drug offenses, we must first work to de-stigmatize minor drug use in this country.