Letter from Howard County

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.

You can find them here.