Drunk & Disorderly

Polanski's Baby

2009-09-28T10:00:00.005-06:00

More than 30 years ago the director Roman Polanski had sex with a 13-year-old girl. Even without knowing the details of the incident, we can probably (most of us) agree that there is an unacceptable power differential between an adolescent teen and a forty-something man of the world. To avoid a likely sentence of 16 years, and a max of 50, Polanski fled the United States and hasn't been back. A few years ago the United States Marshal's Office decided to get him back, and arranged with neutral or extradition-friendly governments to trap this man. They got him last week in Switzerland, where money is more honored than, well, honor.

Polanski is 76, and his "victim" is 44, and neither want anything more to do with the justice system than they did 31 years ago, which is to say they wanted and want nothing to do with it. The case was poorly handled then by a publicity-loving judge who was opposed in his sentencing plan for Polanski by both defense and prosecuting attorneys. Having examined every possible aspect of the case, two sets of probation investigators and more psychiatrists decided probation, and not prison, was the appropriate remedy for what Polanski did. A very good documentary about the case, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," makes a compelling argument against the judge, and against an uninformed opinion about what justice in this case would mean. It's available at Netflix, and elsewhere.

Funny You Mention It

2009-09-17T11:40:00.002-06:00

The Darwin Awards, given annually by...someone, salute "the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it."

In the interest of bringing some (more) humor to the blog, and because I'm too busy to generate some actual original content just now, I'll occasionally post one of the winners under this rubric.

And the first:

When his .38-caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a holdup in Long Beach, California, would-be robber George Marner did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

Criminal Climate

2009-06-25T10:39:00.003-06:00

NASA's climate expert, James Hansen, was arrested the other day. He committed the kind of crime a defense lawyer just loves to defend: a crime against a crime without a corresponding statute.

Mr. Hansen trespassed at the Goals Coal plant, in West Virginia. They're taking the top off a mountain there, using a mining practice which not only sort of messes with the natural skyline, but pumps enough carbon dioxide into the air that someday we'll be able to enjoy a year-round tropical paradise anywhere on earth.

And while I like skimpy bathing suits as much as the next guy or gal, some of the other effects of global warming constitute an environmental crime worth committing a crime against, a crime worth defending.

50,000 Volts Can't Be Wrong

2009-06-04T12:10:00.004-06:00

A Niagara County, New York, judge ruled here that when the police ask you nicely for a DNA cheek swab, you better open up your mouth and say "Ahhhh," or you've got an awful shock coming.

When a prisoner said instead, "No way," police zapped him with a 50,000-volt stun gun for encouragement. Judge Sara Sperrazza said that's okay. She's the only judge in the country who's said that, but it must have likewise brought some encouragement to former VP Dick Cheney, who doesn't understand why more people don't climb on the torture bandwagon he's worked so hard to put together.

See No Evil

2009-05-14T15:21:00.003-06:00

President Obama has decided citizens of the United States, and especially citizens of other countries, ought to remain blindfolded to the photographs that show (probably not) the worst torture inflicted by our military on suspected terrorists (torture 'em enough and they'll soon all be confirmed terrorists). This is good, he says, because then people who don't like America much can't get any further worked up by actually seeing what it is they don't like about us.

This dovetails pretty well with his lack of interest in seeing any of the architects of torture -- guys like President-once (finally?)-removed George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their terrific lawyers -- held accountable in the sort of tribunals we've presided over when what we like to call "the bad guys" were in charge of these things before we took over the terrible responsibility for torture and other war crimes.

But if we just close our eyes...

The Death Penalty Is Killing Us

2009-04-08T12:45:00.002-06:00

There's yet another bill to end the death penalty in Colorado. I'm tired of these bills, tired of seeing them year after year, because we shouldn't have to see them again, ever, because the state legislature should somehow at last discover its collective humanity and pass this bill. I don't know whether you are a Republican, Democrat, or something else. I register Independent. But this is something that should speak, not to your politics, but to your own humanity.

I don't want the death penalty to end because I think the men and women who are sentenced to death don't deserve it. I think in most cases they richly deserve it. But I don't think I deserve it. I don't think my friends and neighbors deserve it. And I don't think you deserve it. You, I, and all of us who do not take human life as these criminals have done, do not deserve to be made like them. Having lost their connection to the value of human life, we do not deserve to tarnish our own connection by taking their lives. They are not worth our own debasement.

The organized campaign legislators are seeing this time emphasizes the economic costs of the death penalty, and urges them to vote their wallets (yours, really) by spending the money, now used to execute our worst criminals, instead to fund cold case investigations that otherwise will remain in deep freeze. I know that these unsolved cases are without question deserving of funding, but I cannot bring myself to associate a dollar value with the dignity of a human being, myself or others.

So I do not join that campaign, that argument. Mine is directed at the recognition and preservation of what some may call the soul, what others may call the spirit, or what I would call our basic human goodness. I simply ask that we not sacrifice that fundamental quality of our collective human existence for the sake of vengeance on a sick, or lost, or maybe simply evil individual.

I am certain you, or someone you know, has a personal connection with someone who has been harmed by capital crime, or who has done this harm. I have written in these pages about my own connection. Many years ago, when I was yet a boy, the State of California strapped my cousin Foster to a chair and made him breathe poison gas. My mother told me that Foster had shot his wife as she slept. He held a pillow against her face and pressed the gun against it so the noise wouldn't disturb his kids sleeping upstairs. It woke them anyway, and the police found Foster kneeling on the floor, his arms around them, rocking back and forth, Foster's shirt soaked with their tears and their mother's blood.

Maybe Foster deserved to suffer for his crime. But his children, decades later, still suffer from the fact that not only had Foster taken their mother from them, but the state went him one better, and made orphans of them. These children I once played with cannot bear the pain of either of their parents' deaths; one of them cannot even bear to speak of it.

This family shines the light on perhaps the darker and usually unseen shadow of our death penalty jurisprudence. We all know that when the murderer kills his victim, in many ways the victim's family dies with him; we need only look at the anger and hatred that has become the life mask of Ron Goldman's father to see that. When the state in turn kills the murderer, the murderer's family suffers no less a death of spirit. Two families are murdered. With my cousins, that family died twice.

We don't have to keep carving these black holes in our souls, our spirits, our human goodness, for the sake of retribution against the killers in our society; our society needn't -- mustn't -- remain a killer too. I would ask my representatives to vote to lay down this legal weapon that reaps death upon death, suffering upon suffering, and raise their voices in affirmation of life -- our own, decent, life.

Drunk & Disorderly at the Bar

2009-04-07T17:43:00.002-06:00

This particular bar is the American Bar Association. It's been so long since I've paid any attention to this blog (and maybe since anyone has), that I've been disbarred by the ABA. Taken off the list of ABA blogs. I deserved it. I've been out of touch with my own writing.

Right now I'm going to climb back on the wagon, if that's the right expression, and try to keep up with myself. Not just for the ABA. For myself. Talk to you soon.

Losing Streak

2008-11-05T22:38:00.002-07:00

No, I don't mean the lack of posts here in the past few months.

Today we have a newly elected District Attorney in my home town. Today, too, we have a new group of happy-go-lucky Boulder citizens whose luck ran out Halloween night, when they put pumpkins on their heads, and took off everything else. They did that for Boulder’s 10th annual Naked Pumpkin Run. The Run was written about well in advance in our local paper, the Daily Camera. The Camera even helpfully offered an “If You Go” pointer to the what, when, and where of it. It would have been hard for people offended by such sights to have been caught by surprise, hard somehow not to have planned to be on the Pearl Street Mall when they all streaked by.

Yet the police, while publicly telling the Camera they planned no arrests, somehow contrived to be waiting at the end of the run by the old county courthouse. Police arrested 12 people and nearly incited a riot – not by the runners but by the crowd who joyfully watched them go by.

There’s no joy for the arrested runners. Every one of them is charged with indecent exposure, which under Colorado’s flawed statute means that if they are convicted – or even accept a plea to a non-sexual offense with a deferred sentence – then they will be required to register as sex offenders. They will carry that label the rest of their lives. These people – scientists, a doctoral candidate, a Fiske Planetarium docent, CU students, a cook, and more – the Dirty Dozen?

Never mind that the police are guilty of selective enforcement: 12 of more than 200 pumpkin runners were culled from the patch, and in nine previous years no arrests were made.

Never mind that the indecent exposure law itself says nothing about indecency, unless you’re of the mind that human genitals are in themselves indecent, a view that bodes ill for survival of the race.

Never mind that the law is probably unconstitutionally broad and vague: you only have to cause affront or alarm to the other guy who can’t tear his gaze from your g’s. If I’ve been blessed with sizeable feet and not-so-sizeable other body parts, I may well be alarmed to discover that others are blessed so in reverse. If you have a Star of David tattooed somewhere south of your belly button, you’ve probably affronted the entire Aryan Nation.

It is certainly true that there is something very naked about people who put on Jack-O-Lantern masks and nothing else for a Halloween entertainment (and if you don’t think it was entertaining ask yourself why everyone there was crowding to see the runners, and no one fleeing the legally horrific sight.)

But it could be considered even remotely sexual only by a sentient pumpkin.

Our new District Attorney campaigned to be tough on crime, and at the same time pledged “being tough on crime also means being smart on crime.” Our new District Attorney could help us out here: labeling these people as sexual offenders isn’t being smart on crime or anything else. These charges should be dismissed, and the Halloween runners shouldn’t have to pay lawyers like me a dime defending their so-called indecent exposure.

This particular Dirty Dozen should be released back into the community to continue their young and productive lives. And let’s throw in that poor kid who ran naked across the Boulder High School football field, for good (and decent) measure.

Our new District Attorney faces a choice: We can get tough on crime, or we can get tough on pumpkins.

Half-Off Sale

2008-07-21T10:02:00.003-06:00

Turns out that a glimpse of Janet Jackson's left breast (or was it the right?) isn't worth a half-million dollars after all. According to this CNN story, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an FCC fine against CBS of $550,000 for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime wardrobe malfunction that apparently left FCC commissioners gasping in shame and perhaps guilty longing.

Most people, of course, wouldn't have paid more than half a buck for the sight.

A Thorn by Any Other Name

2008-05-01T22:34:00.004-06:00

In their new book, Death by a Thousand Cuts, Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue write about a trait shared by Americans and Chinese to this day: we execute human beings. The Chinese used to do it by way of lingchi, slicing off limbs and pieces of flesh. They stopped the practice in 1905.

In the United States today, we mix a cocktail of poison and inject it into people's veins. A week ago the Supreme Court said that's not a bad way to kill a criminal. It doesn't sound so bad as the Chinese method, though the Chinese used to temper the punishment by sedating the criminal with opium, and killing him or her long before lopping off the last ounce of flesh.

We sedate the criminals we kill, too -- at least we think we do. One of three liquids used in our lethal cocktails is supposed to dull the pain of death. Maybe it does, but why so much screaming and contorted and writhing expressions on some of the ones we kill?

The Supreme Court said it isn't cruel. Certainly not like the old Chinese way; certainly not like the disemboweling and dismembering Western nations used to practice, until one by one they gave up killing by any fashion, leaving the United States alone still trying to find a perfect way for the government to take the life of a helpless man or woman or, sometimes, boy or girl.

The authors say of the comparative methods of slaughter, "It is hard to see much distinction in degrees of cruelty." It is hard to see much honor in it, either.

Misleading Advertising

2008-03-05T10:30:00.002-07:00

The American Constitution Society, the left-wing's answer to the right-wing's Federalist Society, has just published an article I rushed to read, titled A Call to Protect Civilian Justice: Beware the Creep of Military Tribunals.

A fine article, though not what I expected: I thought it was about Dick Cheney.

The Scabs Are Healing Nicely, Thank You

2008-01-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Even though, beginning today, I am posting new material on the blog, I haven't crossed any picket lines. True, the Writer's strike goes on, and last month I mistakenly thought it was over, because I got a letter from a writer. My bad. So, there was another literary drought, I grew a beard, and the whole thing was pretty relaxing, all in all. But just yesterday I reached an independent agreement with the writers: I won't write any movies or television shows, and they won't write about criminal defense.

So. No more drought. Happy New Year.

They Shoot Journalists, Don't They?

2008-01-23T10:53:00.001-07:00

Actually, I think they cut their heads off. An Afghani court has sentenced a student journalist to death, according to CNN. His crime? He downloaded an article the court didn't like and shared it with his classmates. Something to do about better treatment for women, a suggestion that can obviously get you killed in some countries.

Even though the United States likewise still executes its young, at least they get the benefit of counsel and open, if not always completely fair, trials before we fry, gas, hang, or shoot them.

Odds and Ends

2007-12-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, as a criminal defense lawyer, I have the feeling from time to time that I'm not totally appreciated, because I'm a criminal defense lawyer. And it's not just at parties when someone asks me, how can you defend such scum? For example, I must have had our cleaning lady over to our house hundreds of times, but I've never even been invited to hers.

Back in the Saddle Again

2007-12-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness the writer's strike is over. I can get back to the blog again.

Wishful Thinking?

2007-10-15T11:14:00.000-06:00

Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who privately enjoys a man-to-man talk from time to time, but publicly likes to demean gay men, now has taken to demeaning Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who I'm pretty sure has never had the pleasure of addressing the senator underneath a toilet stall. According to CNN, Craig said Romney, his former campaign boss, "threw me under the campaign bus" when Romney learned Craig had pleaded guilty to playing footsie with an undercover, top-of-the-toilet, cop.

Dream on, Senator. Hey, and while you're at it, why not keep your word and give up your seat to someone who deserves it (your Senate seat, that is)?

Imbalance of Powers

2007-09-28T11:34:00.000-06:00

The United States Constitution, normally a touchstone not only for lawyers but all citizens, residents, and visitors of this country, may seem out-of-touch with reality to immigrants trying to pass their civics test to become naturalized Americans.

One question, for example, asks "What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?"

The real-world answer, in the real world of the Bush executive branch, is of course, "Nothing."

But for wannabe Americans who are better advised to adopt the current Administration's low regard for "reality-based" governance, you should still answer, "Checks and Balances" or "Separation of Powers." And welcome to America.

Indecent Charges

2007-09-28T08:29:00.000-06:00

In my hometown (Boulder, Colorado), I'm sorry to say at least one of our police officers expressed a prurient interest in a high school senior by writing him a ticket for indecent exposure after the boy tried to streak (mostly) naked across a football field. He (the boy, not the officer) was attired in purple paint and stylish racing flats. I say the officer's interest was "prurient" because indecent exposure requires that the boy "knowingly expose(d) his genitals to the view of any person under circumstances in which such conduct is likely to cause affront or alarm to the other person."

Now the only people who apparently might have been offended were the officers themselves, because the lad was arrested in flagrante but not delicto, before he had actually started to streak the field. As far as I can tell from the newspaper account, there were no other witnesses to this shocking, absolutely shocking behavior. And we all know what kind of affront or alarm it must have caused the officers to prompt them to scotch-tape snack napkins over the child's purple pubescence. It is devoutly to be hoped that our guardians of public decency allowed the boy to apply the sticky strips himself.

The law itself presupposes circumstances that are NOT likely to cause affront or alarm. Surely streaking is one such circumstance, where the only alarm one might experience is that the poor kid will trip and suffer a debilitating turf-burn.

Other students have started a campaign to free the misdemeanant. Of course, free him. And in the spirit of giving people the benefit of the doubt, let's free the officers too, and cease this fruitless speculation about whether they're spending their off-hours in a museum somewhere, ogling a Michaelangelo.

We Get By with a Little Help from Our Friends

2007-09-21T10:12:00.000-06:00

A Filipino judge, unconscionably fired from his bench for hiring invisible (at least to the less perceptive among us) elves as court clerks, wants his job back. Florentino Floro Jr. says that if he is re-elevated to the bench (judges must be elevated to the bench because it's a few steps up) he'll call off the king of the elves, who's turned hit man, inflicting illness and car accidents on Floro's former bosses, the Supreme Court.

Floro says the elves only help him predict the future on his personal time, and never used them to help him make judicial decisions. Of course not: that would be unethical.

Fifth and Goal

2007-09-18T09:46:00.000-06:00

It has always been about getting O.J. Simpson. He is now being held without bail on a charge that other people with a high public profile -- or no public profile -- would be released on bail or no bail at all.

And why not? O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and then went golfing. What many people -- maybe most people -- don't realize is that exactly the right thing happened in both his murder trial and his wrongful death conviction. California prosecutors dazzled by their months and months of fame had a slam-dunk case and then blew it. The jurors were right: even when everybody knows the defendant is guilty, prosecutors still have to prove it. Instead they turned the trial into a fashion show and stood gawking when the model walked down the runway and kept walking.

Game over?

Not really, as you are about to see. Nevada will take its turn with Simpson, and if that state's police and prosecutors can avoid screwing up they will get the conviction they didn't get in California, and a judge will sentence Simpson to consecutive terms the effect of which will be to keep him in prison for as long as would have the murder convictions.

Don't like the outcome of the game? Put a little more time on the clock.

A Man of Big Little Words

2007-09-13T10:37:00.000-06:00

By the way, my translation program translates "über" as "more über." I knew that.

Perspective

2007-09-13T09:34:00.000-06:00

Did you have a bad day today?

Protesters in Chile celebrated, with gusto, the anniversary of the murderous coup that brought über-murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, killing a policeman by shooting him in the face.

The parents of 26,575 children, aged 5 or under, buried them today, as other parents bury the same number of their children, aged 5 or under, every day.

Three more American boys and girls serving in Iraq were put in the ground; who knows how many Iraqis went under (we don't like to count those boys and girls).

Another child who isn't old enough to take her first drink spent the day recounting to police how she had been raped, stabbed, beaten, and burned for a week.

A Tennessee man made the headlines by becoming the first guy the state strapped into an electric chair and burned and fried in almost 50 years. I'm sure he deserved it; I'm not sure the rest of us did.

And Woody Allen opened his New York Times this morning to learn that in five billion years the sun is gonna die.

Did you have a bad day today?

Singing for His Life

2007-09-06T08:34:00.000-06:00

I heard Luciano Pavarotti sing live only once. It was on the Esplanade along the Charles River in Boston. Scores of thousands of people sat on the grass or stood to hear the greatest voice of the century. Many of them wept openly at the stunning beauty of the sound. I was one of them.

I don't believe in God, but hearing that man sing, I knew why people do believe in God. This morning, although I know it isn't true because there are and will be other voices to remind us of what we call divinity, it feels as though there is a little less God on this planet Earth.

The Crime of Monsieur Craig

2007-08-31T12:05:00.000-06:00

I suppose it's fun to see one Republican exemplar of family values after another elbow his or her way to the front to decry the sins of Senator Larry Craig, and urge him to go home to his private Brokeback Mountain. And sins he has aplenty. He once tried to destroy a better legislator, and a better man, Barney Frank, for openly loving another man, where Craig preferred the loving attentions of strangers he met in bathroom stalls and somehow never got around to introducing to his wife. He's opposed the right of homosexuals to defend the country they love. He's opposed their right to commit their hearts and souls to the men and women they love.

But none of the exemplars of family values decry these sins, nor the hypocrisy that rots the Senator's moral gut. They want him to resign because -- oh my God -- he's a homosexual. That's going to hurt the party for sure.

I want him to resign, too. But not because he's a homosexual. I. Don't. Care. I want him to resign because he's a liar and a cheat, and while I realize those are common, and perhaps requisite, qualities on Capitol Hill, I don't really like it.

I'd also like the resignations of every man and woman who think it's a crime for a man to ask another man, or woman, or dolphin capable of making an informed choice, if he or she would like to have sex. I don't know about you, but I don't really want my police officers serving and protecting the community by sitting in a toilet stall and playing footsie with the neighbors.

Comedians

2007-08-31T11:15:00.000-06:00

They say three strikes and you're out. In the case of the University of Colorado, in my hometown of Boulder, three strikes and you're outed. In three recent incidents (though one of them long-brewing), our supposed bastion of education has proved itself intolerant to, of all things, education. Not to mention free speech.

First up was a professor of previous little note, who had the utter gall to point out that there may have been actual reasons that Middle Easterners would hijack airplanes and run them into American buildings. Ward Churchill, who I do think is a sort of pompous windbag (never a disqualification for a university professor before), made the mistake of publicly disagreeing with Americans who prefer to believe all those criminals were simply crazy people out of their minds with dreams of virgins waiting on the other side of the burning buildings. For this the university bent over backwards to find reasons Churchill should be fired, while denying his perhaps intemperate remarks had nothing to do with their sudden investigation.

Next, earlier this week a mentally ill man attacked a student on campus, injuring him slightly. The university response was to round up every employee with a mental health history and suspend them as prospective threats. I'm sure there must have been a young black student arrested sometime in the past few months, for something. I'm surprised the university lets even one black man or woman walk around campus unrestrained. The same goes for the law students there.

Finally, an a capella group trying to recruit fresh voices now finds itself one voice short. An audition questionnaire jokingly referenced the poor student who suffered the slight injury just mentioned. The offending question asked how prospective basso profundos felt about the incident, and included as one of the scripted choices: "Mad someone got that guy before you did." The resulting uproar, much greater than the one heard after the university turned on a vulnerable group of employees who did nothing but their jobs, ended with the firing of the singer who wrote the silly question.

The name of the a capella group? The CU Buffoons, not to be confused with the folks who fired Ward Churchill and cleared the campus of employees tainted by mental illness. (Does anybody still work there?) The surprising thing to take from all this, I suppose, is that these guys really ARE buffoons, only some of whom can actually carry a tune.

Vaya Con el Diablo

2007-08-28T08:25:00.000-06:00

Alberto Gonzales is gone but with any luck not forgotten.

He was a lawyer who devoted himself not to the law, but to a man. He was a defender of torture, a defender of illegal search and seizure, a defender of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, but he was never a defender of the Constitution.

If he is missed it will be because we need always to keep the enemies of freedom front and center.

Fraternizing with the Enemy

2007-08-25T11:50:00.000-06:00

I know many defense attorneys who, by nature or perhaps by experience, absolutely hate the men and women who sit in the attorney seats nearest the jury: the prosecutors. There are, without doubt, prosecutors who for the sake of the profession and their communities should be practicing anything but law. That's just as true about defense attorneys, by the way.

But there are also prosecutors who, like many of their defense counterparts, are the glory of the profession. A wonderful chance to take a look at two good ones and 10 bad ones at the same time (not necessarily an accurate ratio of good-to-bad prosecutors) can be found here where Sherri Katz and Bob Bennett name "The 10 Worst U.S. Prosecutors 2007." Both these former prosecutors consider themselves to have been on the "good" side of the ledger, and from what I've seen of their blog, "Bad Prosecutors," I agree. The list, and the blog, are a public service.

Yeah, But on a Sliding Scale You'll Pay Only $750 an Hour

2007-08-24T16:41:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that top lawyers in New York are now billing $1,000 an hour. Apart from giving criminal defense a whole new meaning, one anonymous lawyer worried that billing a grand for 60 of the finest minutes (a lot of) money can buy could be "a possible vomit point for clients." So if you're going to be accused of a crime, do your best to get accused in Colorado. It's a lot less messy around here.

And Speaking of Beginnings

2007-08-21T08:40:00.000-06:00

The first time I ever thought deeply about the law was when the State of California strapped my cousin Foster to a chair and made him breathe poison gas.

Foster had shot his wife as she slept. He held a pillow against her face and pressed the gun against it so the noise wouldn’t disturb his two kids sleeping upstairs. It woke them anyway, and the police found Foster kneeling on the floor, his arms around them, rocking back and forth, Foster’s shirt soaked with their tears and their mother’s blood.

I learned this through my own mother’s tears as she stood bending over the kitchen table, staring at a newspaper clipping that told about Foster’s execution the day before. She said Foster was a good man who had gone insane. I read the clipping again and again. How could they take his life like that? Could they take mine when I was grown? Could they take my son’s? If he really was insane, was it right to kill him? I didn’t know, and no one else was even talking about it.

Three years later another man sat in the same chair where my cousin Foster had sat, and everyone was talking about it. His name was Caryl Chessman.

I decided then to become a lawyer, and find out why Chessman’s life was so championed, and Foster’s so forgotten.

My first law partner was Richard Milner. Our firm was Rosmarin & Milner, though if you asked Dick Milner about it, he might remember it as Milner & Rosmarin. We two lawyers were going to slay every dragon of injustice, give voice to those who had none, and make the world better. Those at least were our dreams. I was 13 years old.

Sometimes, bad things happen. That same year my mother died; our family fractured. So did Rosmarin & Milner: there was no money for law school.

Instead I worked three jobs to pay my way through college, and persisted despite setbacks that saw me graduate well after most of my fellow freshmen had earned their degrees. Though I put aside any idea of being a lawyer (in part because I discovered a small talent for writing), I never lost the zeal for justice and fair treatment. As a college journalist I investigated what seemed the unfair denial of tenure of one of my professors. The series won the William Randolph Hearst Award for College Journalism.

I turned full-time professional six years before graduation, and continued to pursue the kind of news reporting I felt could make a difference in the community. I continued to win awards, for investigations of unfair business practices, of corruption in local government, of organized crime. Beyond that kind of formal recognition for my work, I took no less gratification in certain expressions of unsolicited appreciation offered by the subjects of those news stories:

• the crooked owner of a waste disposal business who wrote to object to being called a “trash magnate.”

• the planning commissioner who—after being indicted and convicted partly on the evidence uncovered by my work—as he was being led off to prison, turned and shook my hand, and said I had been fair and had done a good job.

• the spokesman for a commercial real estate giant in California who was overheard by a colleague to say that I was ruthless when I saw injustice and would never give up.

• a trio of heavy–set “vice presidents” of a diamond business, run by organized crime, who followed me around in hopes of intimidating me from featuring their company in my newspaper. Their associates had successfully discouraged an Arizona reporter the year before by blowing him up. We featured them anyway, I stayed intact, and they moved back to the desert.

Then came the ‘80s. The “but enough about you, let’s talk about me” ‘80s. I was as guilty as anyone else: I wanted to make some money, and I discovered I could make a lot more of it writing advertising than I could chasing crooks with a typewriter.

Advertising filled my wallet but not my soul. In 1986 I enrolled in Naropa Institute to study psychology, and to work with people in crisis. As an intern, later an employee, of the Emergency Psychiatric Service of the Mental Health Center of Boulder County, in Colorado, I saw people at their worst, and helped them find their way back to their best (or at least their not–so–bad). What I learned of human nature there, and what I was able to give back of my own human nature, was useful and of value to me (and I hope to others) in law school, and I trust will continue to be now as a lawyer.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I wanted to tell you what brought me to this beloved and reviled profession.

Sometimes, good things happen. I met a woman, loved her, had children with her. The years before law school I spent nurturing those little sweethearts, work that was, and continues to be, at least as nurturing to me. When both of them had started school, and were beginning to find their own voices, I was reminded of my own childhood aspirations.

And so I remembered Foster, and what I wanted to be.

Life is long, its experiences rich, and a human being may be many things: a journalist, an ad man, a therapist, and, some scant few decades after that boy declared his heartfelt intention, a lawyer.

The Best Way To Begin

2007-08-18T11:54:00.000-06:00

The best way to begin, is to begin.

And so this first post is intended to be nothing more than that: a beginning.

Drunk & Disorderly will be a legal blog, but at the same time it will be a people blog. People commit crimes, people are fairly and unfairly charged, people suffer in and out of court. When was the last time your dog was pulled over for a DUI?

This is a place for me. A place to sound off, think out loud, and share some things both important and not too important to me. I should probably do some thinking in quiet before I write anything here, for your sake and mine, but I don't want this space to be measured or academic in any way. I'm not sure I could even be academic. For a while -- maybe for a long while, maybe forever -- things will be pretty chaotic. I like chaos. You'll get a lot of it here.

I'll write here whatever I like, whenever I like. Most of it will be related to legal issues in general, and criminal defense topics in particular. Some of it will be related to nothing at all. None of it will be legal advice. If you need legal advice call me or one of the 18,000 other lawyers in Colorado, make an appointment, and we'll take your money.

This is a place for you, too. A place to find information, a sympathetic ear, maybe a laugh or two. I'll try not to bore you. I'll sure as hell try not to bore me.

There. That's it. That's my beginning.