Lawyer and Adjunct Professor of Law Michael Lewis seems to have written almost as many law review articles as I’ve written blog posts, all whilst holding down a full-time job at Concord law firm Rath Young Pignatelli. Before joining that firm as shareholder, he was assistant attorney general in the New Hampshire Department of Justice Homicide Unit.
Cassandra Moran, co-author of the piece you’re about to thoroughly enjoy, is a legal extern at the same law firm, and has also worked as a legal extern for the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, and as a bright summer intern at the United States Attorneys Office in Concord.
The authors have generously allowed publication here of their work before it appears in the forthcoming edition of the University of New Hampshire Law Review (Ms. Moran also happens to be managing editor of that law review, so she can do anything she wants).
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I was stopped by a policeman the other day, the same policeman who might have stopped my father-in-law once on a road in Howard County back in the day when Bobby still felt the need for speed he’d acquired as an Air Force Sabrejet pilot.
This cop, name of Clarke Ahlers, stopped me, not with his flashing lights, but with a letter kindly telling me about a terrific criminal justice podcast he hosts with a blue buddy of his, name of Serge Antonin. Both are blue by former profession (Clarke’s now a criminal defense lawyer; Serge, an ex-Baltimore cop, a security specialist), and white and black, respectively, by pigmentation. I mention race, because their podcast mentions it. It’s called “Black and White and Thin Blue Lines.”
The men say their podcast is inspired by the person we celebrate today, and every Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and start each one with perhaps less-remembered words King spoke in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
In that speech King characterized the founding documents of the United States as a promissory note to every American, black as well as white, guaranteeing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
He said America had defaulted on that note, instead giving its black citizens a bad check returned by the Bank of Justice stamped “insufficient funds.”
Every podcast begins with the words King said next.
But we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
There are twenty-five podcasts already in the podcasters’ vault, recorded over the past ten months. They first flashed their lights on the jury selection process in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of the murder of George Floyd. Other episodes examine the impact of police body cams; whether police have the right to order you out of your car during a routine traffic stop; rapid response to active shooters (like the one not quite a year ago in my hometown); and their thoughts on the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, a boy who thought it would be cool to carry a man’s gun to a racial justice protest, lost control, and used it to kill two men and wound another.
No episode is more than an hour, and many are closer to the thirty-minute mark: good lunchtime listening.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Is there another democracy on earth working as hard as mine to make it illegal to vote?
For me, this is not an idle question. I really want to know. For anyone living outside the United States, in a democracy that actually means it, do you have a law that could put you in jail for making it easier for your neighbors to vote?
We’ve got plenty of them now pending or enacted in the United States, and plenty more on the way.
In Pennsylvania, help someone who can’t walk or drive get their ballot to the dropbox? You go to jail.
In Georgia, give old Cicely Tyson a bottle of water ‘cause she’s waitin’ in line to vote and can’t quite make it to the fountain? You go to jail.
In Wisconsin and Iowa, send a ballot to someone who didn’t ask for it? You go to jail.
In Montana, mail your ballot and, because she’s busy making the real money for the family, mail your wife’s too as a small favor? Jail.
Texas sent a woman to prison for five years because she tried to vote and didn’t know she was ineligible. How is that proportionate sentencing in a state that elected Ted Cruz, twice?
Tennessee tried to make it a crime if you forgot to fill in some line on your voter registration application.
Once you go to jail, we’ve got plenty more states making sure you don’t go to the ballot box again anytime soon. Kentucky and Virginia make you a lifetime civic pariah: you never get to vote again. More than five million Americans can’t vote because of felony convictions. If every one of them had voted for their favorite criminal in 2020, we’d have a different Presi…no, that guy still would’ve lost by a couple million votes. Does it make sense that people who commit crimes shouldn’t be able to vote? Many of the people they would be able to vote for (like the big loser just mentioned) go to elected office with the specific intention to commit crimes, or commit them along the way.
My little sister reminded me the other day of something our distant Uncle Sam once remarked about some of the folks who make these laws:
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Maybe we should look to other democracies that actually encourage voting.
Another family member, my son-in-law, reminded me the other, other day — I need a lot of reminding lately — that Brazil has a law we might want to consider way up here. There, and in maybe thirty other countries, it is illegal NOT to vote.
