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

The United States of America was led by a criminal for four disgraceful years.

The Congress of the United States remains peppered with criminals, remains a disgrace. These criminals are accessories after the fact (and perhaps before) to seditious conspiracy as defined by 18 U.S. Code § 2384:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

Mitch McConnell has never put his life on the line, for anyone.

Kevin McCarthy has never put his life on the line, for anyone. Neither have Ted Cruz, nor Josh Hawley, nor Paul Gosar, nor Mo Brooks, nor Andy Biggs.

Jim Jordan not only has never put his life on the line, for anyone, but was unable to put even a job on the line to prevent the sexual abuse of his own students.

These men, and many more men and women of the U.S. Congress, have chosen, and continue with regularity to choose, to put mere jobs over the Constitution they have sworn to support and defend.

They don’t want the American people to hear any more about the seditious 6 January attack (that a number of them helped to incite) that tried by force to prevent a peaceful transfer of Presidential power.

So now they’ve done everything they can, short of renewed force, to stop the Congressional investigation that began today into that terrorist insurrection.

We need to look forward, not backward, they said with their votes to prevent this inquiry. We need to put this behind us.

Of course they want to put it behind them. All criminals want to put their crimes behind them.

They didn’t want us to hear from the people — the D.C. Metropolitan and Capitol police — who actually did put their lives on the line for these ungrateful cowards.

We did hear from them, and will hear from more.

And if there is still such a thing as justice in America, we won’t have to hear any more from the miserable crooks who tried to stop them, after the next rounds of elections.

Because it’s time to send these criminals, if not to jail, home.

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

The Fourth of July seems a slightly better day as any to salute America’s Proud Boys (I’d salute the Girls, too, but the Boys are wonderfully old-fashioned in their thinking and have a separate organization for girls called Proud Boys’ Girls which shows pride of ownership).

Early January, the Proud Boys celebrated their independence early, by storming the Capitol to prove they are independent of democracy itself. Who needs an election when you can just plant your Trump flag deep into the body of a Capitol police officer and declare a winner?

A few months ago an underappreciative Canadian government designated the Proud Boys a terrorist entity. Canadians.

The Proud Boys much prefer to call themselves Western Chauvinists. Partly because Western Chauvinists have no geographical imperative to share common cultural ideas, philosophical foundations, and ancestral beliefs with people who look to them like Shylock or Little Black Sambo. Partly because Western Chauvinists sounds more pleasing to the ear than Neo-Nazi Ninnies.

But I write not to praise the Proud Boys (we have a former President for that), but to solicit your stories about what’s in their name.

We all have done things of which we are ashamed. But we all have also done things of which we are proud. I want to hear about those things of which you are proud, of one moment in your career, one moment in your passing through this life, that made you feel elevated, that made you think perhaps someone around you felt elevated by what you did.

Tell me, and in the next time or two I’ll write about what you told me.

Just don’t — do not — tell me you’re one of them Proud Boys.

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

When I was a lad, there were about two hundred thousand Americans rotting in our jails and prisons.

Today we’re headed toward two and a half million. Nearly twelve times that of my callow youth. It isn’t the population: not even twice as many of us today as when I was a lad. Nor the crime rate.

But a quarter of the entire world’s prisoners reside in the land of the free.

We’ve got prisons for everyone. State prisons. Federal prisons. Juvenile correction facilities. Local jails. Immigration detention facilities. Indian Country jails. Military prisons. Civil commitment centers. State psychiatric hospitals. In all fifty states and beyond. We even stack them up in Pago Pago (that’s where I’d want to go, if there’s a window with a view).

So we’re pretty good at punishing our people. We’re certainly better at it than the rest of the world. The average criminal sentence in the United States is nearly sixteen times longer than our closest neighbor, Canada, ten times longer than Germany, six times longer than Finland, five times longer than England and Wales, while not quite two times longer than Australia, which was founded as a penal colony yet still lags as punisher next to us.

Australia and England punish its murderers with sentences eight years on average shorter than the United States (twenty-one years); Sweden, fifteen years shorter.

The murderer Derek Chauvin got twenty-two and a half years for killing George Floyd. Many felt that wasn’t enough.

He leaned a knee into a helpless man’s neck till he couldn’t breathe, till his heart couldn’t beat, and longer yet just to show the horrified crowd who was in charge. At sentencing he offered condolences to the family as if it was a shame Floyd died but what could he do about it.

But, for the crime for which he was convicted, of murder he did not intend, twenty-two and a half years is hardly a slap on the wrist. It is not the forty-year maximum he might have received, not the thirty years the prosecutor asked, but also not the ten years and eight months possible under Minnesota sentencing guidelines, and certainly not the time served the idiot defense lawyer humbly requested.

The question oughtn’t be, should Chauvin and people like him be serving longer sentences.

The question is, with so much of America imprisoned, do longer sentences serve us.

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

The President of the United States is usually a man of many talents. One talent I didn’t hope to see in the current guy is the ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth.

Joe Biden made a campaign promise to end the federal death penalty.

Today his administration filed a brief with the United States Supreme Court urging it to continue the death penalty at least until the feds can stick a needle in the Boston marathon bomber. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence had been overturned, but Biden says it would be nice to flip it back.

Tsarnaev’s lawyer argues Biden should keep his promise and allow Tsarnaev to spend the rest of his life in prison. Guess he’d rather be in Colorado.

There is no doubt that if anyone deserves the death penalty, this one does. But the whole point of campaigning to abolish the death penalty is to hold that no one does.

You can’t credibly say in one breath that no one should be put to death by the government, and in the next say, well, except this man, who is really, really bad.

Like the really bad man’s lawyer, I’d like to see Biden keep his promise.

I’d like to see a President with the talent to speak out of the front of his mouth. Always and ever.

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

I’ve twice been called for jury duty. Not once have I served.

First time, many years ago, I was a law student. Nobody wants a law student on the jury. Not the prosecution, not the defense. A law student might actually pay attention to the law, to the facts, and how the facts interact with the law. Can’t have that.

Second time, today, was worse. If nobody wants a law student on the jury, nobody and his little brother want a criminal defense lawyer on the jury. The prosecution, for obvious reasons. The defense? Every defense lawyer knows that probably eighty-five percent of folks charged with a criminal offense are guilty. Not quite proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but getting there.

This was the first major criminal trial in my home town since March 2020 held in person without social distancing. We still had to wear masks. For ten hours if you were there for the entire jury selection process. I was there for the entire jury selection process. Nobody ever found out I was a criminal defense lawyer. Nobody found out, because nobody asked.

A panel of twelve jurors and one alternate juror was chosen for this trial from maybe fifty persons who were called at random to occupy twenty-five seats. Only people in those seats are asked questions.

Some of those people are almost always dismissed for cause, meaning the judge agrees with the lawyer who challenges the juror that he or she cannot be fair, unbiased, or physically or emotionally capable of serving. The juror may be the sole caretaker for a person who may starve to death if uncared for, for a week. The juror may be unable to look at the defendant without thinking, gee, he looks guilty as hell. The juror may be a blogger who has written that the judge is an idiot and the prosecutor a fascist.

There are twenty-five seats of people asked questions because, as I mentioned, only thirteen will be chosen as jurors, and the other twelve will be removed at the end of the process for no stated reasons at all. Those twelve are called peremptory challenges, of which the prosecution and defense each get six.

Unstated reasons to reject a juror are as many as there are things we don’t say out loud. The prospective juror is black and I don’t like black jurors (unconstitutional but frequent and often unchallenged). She looks like my mother and my psychiatrist knows only too well what I think of my mother. That juror seems really committed to that nonsense about innocent till proven guilty and by God determined to be fair and I don’t want fair I want guilty.

I had the great good fortune not to hear my name randomly called to rotate into one of those twenty-five seats.

The great good fortune because, even in a mask, the defendant looked guilty as hell.