The Perfect Sentence

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

I’ve been very fortunate as a criminal defense lawyer: I’ve rarely had to give a sentencing argument.

Preparing one, I always wonder if I had missed something. Something to persuade a prosecutor to dismiss the case. A Perry Mason moment I’ve actually been able to spring a few times. Some overlooked fact that would have convinced a judge or jury there was at least one reasonable doubt my client was guilty.

In English there is the perfect sentence. This is one. It is as clean as a bone. In the courtroom there are no perfect sentences. They all do harm. To your client, to the families caught up in the case, sometimes to the fabric of the state.

So I try to avoid sentencing arguments as much as I can. But sometimes, a sentencing argument is all the lawyer has. Eighty-five percent of our clients are guilty, if not of the original charge, at least of something. And even innocent people sometimes plead guilty because they are too afraid of trial.

Which is why I’d like you to meet another criminal defense lawyer I’ve admired for awhile who has spent more than two decades crafting arguments designed to win his guilty clients if not perfect, then best possible sentences.

Doug Passon literally has been there a thousand times. He brings award-winning documentary talent to creating courtroom mitigation videos that have spared his clients, and the clients of other criminal defense lawyers he has coached, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

I’m not sure exactly where Doug is, but I know he’s somewhere near my little brother in Arizona.
Like me, he writes a blog.

It was while reading his blog, about sentencing, that I remembered I’ve been wanting to write about him. Because while he writes about sentencing, he writes about hope. “We need as much hope as we can get in this system,” he writes, “and in this lifetime.” He writes that just about two months before the United States — the world — is plunged into fearsome quarantine.

So, he can teach us something.

Something like this.