I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Brian Owsley is a constitutional law professor with a background in human rights lawyering who first graced these pages last October.
He wrote today to tell me he’s been busy, but not too busy to look into the Don of Mar-a-Lago’s baby-man-whining about the FBI raiding “my beautiful home.” (That’s my characterization, not Professor Owsley’s, who I may have mentioned before is a way nicer man than I).
A former United States magistrate judge who himself signed countless search warrants, Owsley says while the search and seizure may have been shocking to the Orange McMuffin (me again; can’t help myself) and his toadies (yup), it was also something that the big boy never seemed to concern himself with much before: it was constitutional.
He wrote about it, in much gentler language, for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News.
Fili and Kay-Kay Filizzola, who are 500 Year Flood, Perform a Road Trip
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The Bing Crosby and Bob Hope motion picture “Road to Rio” was released the same year my mama released me.
I mention it not because there’s a lot of criminal conspiracy in it, though there is. No, I mention it because I’m a proud papa whose singer daughter and her guitarist husband have their own new Rio-themed release.
It’s called “Midnight in Rio,” and they’re called 500 Year Flood. My daughter wrote the song with Fabi Metzker (who also sings), Helton Lima, and Richard Neves.
It’s got salt water, sunshine, samba sounds, and kisses from the sea in it, and some more stuff I can’t mention because I only know approximately one word in Portuguese; rest assured my daughter knows many more.
Listen to it on your favorite music platform here.
Consider it a fling on my part, but if you do listen, I’m sure you won’t mind.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
A couple months ago I wrote about the ten worst Supreme Court justices in United States history. Remarkably, no current justice made that list; for a couple of them, there’s still time.
But the same fellow who compiled that list — Bernard Schwartz in “A Book of Legal Lists” — also had a list of the ten greatest Supreme Court justices.
All of them were tremendous legal reasoners. Were they also tremendous human beings?
At the top of his list — maybe of everybody’s list — is John Marshall, fourth Chief Justice of the United States.
Marshall effected perhaps the greatest property theft in history, ruling in 1823’s Johnson v. M’Intosh that American Indians did not own their land, that their right to it was defeated by the “laws” of discovery and conquest. Indians may occupy land; they may not possess it. Thus was established as manifest destiny the right of the republic to expand to the Pacific, and aboriginal occupants to be driven by treaty to smaller and usually harsher reservations.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is second on the list of our greatest justices. O.W. Holmes, who said in Buck v. Bell in 1927 “three generations of imbeciles are enough” as Constitutional justification for the forced sterilization of “feeble-minded” inmates of state mental hospitals.
Third on the list is Earl Warren. As attorney general and governor of California during World War II, he ruthlessly supported the removal from their homes and jobs of Americans of Japanese descent to intern them behind barbed wire under armed guard. He explained himself plainly: “If the Japs are released, no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap.” As Chief Justice, he later strongly defended Korematsu v. United States. He expressed deep regret at all that only in his posthumously published memoirs.
Those are just the first three. The three greatest.
I haven’t the heart to go on. But if you do, and get all the way to number ten, fair warning: it’s Chief Justice Roger Taney.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
When I was fourteen years old, there wasn’t a football pass I couldn’t catch, a pretty girl I wouldn’t hope to catch. My mother was dead three months; her death taught me how much I wanted to live.
George Stinney was fourteen too when he learned how much he wanted to live.
Seventy-eight years and one month ago, the state of South Carolina taught him that lesson when it strapped him into an ill-fitting electric chair made for bigger folk and pushed five thousand three hundred eighty volts through his little body. I won’t show you the picture of the large white hands adjusting the strap of the outsize metal cap under which George’s small black face is scrunched tight in tears moments before.
They said he’d murdered two even younger white girls after the oldest, eleven, refused to have sex with him, and the youngest, seven, refused to leave so he could have sex with the other girl. Murdered them and left them in a ditch.
There was scarce evidence that he’d done that. He became a suspect when he joined a search for the missing girls and told another searcher he’d spoken to them the day before. A black boy speaking with white girls. Police officers who interrogated the boy for hours without parents or lawyer testified George admitted the killings. There was no written and signed confession; the alleged verbal confession came after the boy was told he would be given an ice cream cone if he’d admit it. George liked ice cream.
His trial for murder lasted less than some traffic tickets I’ve litigated. It took an all-white jury just about ten minutes to decide hell, yes, this black boy should die for what he did to those white girls.
Seventy years later another judge decided he’d done nothing to those white girls other than try to help find them.
George Stinney’s conviction was vacated.
The fourteen-year-old boy, who liked ice cream and wanted to live, was just as dead.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I get a lot of letters from other lawyers reminding me there’s a lot of good work out there not being done by me. When I do get the time to catch up, I like to let folks know about it.
Around the beginning of the year, criminal defence (how they spell it in Canada) lawyer Heather Ferg wrote from Calgary to let me know she and her colleague Clayton Rice run a project similar to Drunk & Disorderly. It’s called On the Wire, and it’s full of interesting stuff with an international focus — about cybercrime, multibillion-dollar pyramid schemes, fair sentences for mass murderers in a country that has abolished its death penalty, and much more.
In April, the executive director of The Sentencing Project, Amy Fettig, wrote from the national capital to express hope “for a more just and equitable future.” The Project works to advance racial justice, end extreme criminal sentences, expand voting rights, and promote youth justice. All of which suffered under another executive director in the national capital for four years and beyond, and threaten to suffer another four years if that one somehow avoids prison and finds enough utter fools to help him. Maybe a secret medical report buried somewhere in the Annual Report Fettig included is one source of her hope. Fingers crossed.
From Portland, Oregon, Joshua Cohen wrote in May, about his newsletter — Fat Pencil Studio News — and the work his company does. Every criminal defense lawyer knows the importance of going to the scene of the crime. Cohen brings the crime scene to the judge and jury, creating 3D visual models and scenes more persuasive to communicating the defense theory of the case than any amount of slick lawyer talk.
You can see exactly what he means here, starting with the blog post he wrote about police violence, after the killing of George Floyd; you can roam around his website for an illuminating tour of cutting-edge trial graphics.
Reaching way back, I got a letter from Miami, from someone who also works in legal video concepts. But what really interested me about Katrina Daniel is the crime podcast she does: “Prime Time Crime.” Anybody who can rhyme three words in a row has my immediate admiration. She’s a broadcast journalist who has won a Peabody Award — not the one associated with the Wayback Machine that helped me reach way back for her letter — and been nominated for an Emmy.
Topics or guests recently include a look back at the Gianni Versace murder; Mark Anthony the Psychic Lawyer (he somehow knows all his clients are guilty); the sentencing of child sex trafficker Gislaine Maxwell; a woman who grew up with the Unabomber; and a flight attendant who stole a baby’s identity and used it to get a job, a pilot’s license, and admission to college (that must have been some baby). Digging deeper into the one hundred twenty five episodes, Daniel covers everything you’d want her to cover, back to the first episode nearly two years ago when Gislaine Maxwell was merely an alleged child sex trafficker.
It’s pure candy for true crime fans, and the portions won’t make you fat: episodes are a half hour and usually less.
You can hear her incredible body of work on any of the podcast platforms. And you should.
