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.
25 June 2009
04 June 2009
50,000 Volts Can't Be Wrong
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.
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.
14 May 2009
See No Evil
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...
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...
08 April 2009
The Death Penalty Is Killing Us
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.
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.
07 April 2009
Drunk & Disorderly at the Bar
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.
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.
05 November 2008
Losing Streak
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.
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.
21 July 2008
Half-Off Sale
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.
Most people, of course, wouldn't have paid more than half a buck for the sight.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)