Drunk & Disorderly

I don’t know: maybe we should call in the FBI. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is just…missing. There’s a fairly large Clarence Thomas doll they prop up on the Supreme Bench, but even a Chatty Cathy talks. The Clarence Thomas doll doesn’t talk.

Justice Thomas is supposedly an advocate of the Second Amendment. That’s the one where ordinary people get to pretend they’re members of a state militia. But in a widely hyped Second Amendment case heard today — McDonald v. Chicago — Clarence Thomas didn’t fire a single shot. Not even a blank.

Perusing the transcript, you see Justice Scalia (who really likes to talk) mentioned 52 times; Chief Justice Roberts 30 times; Justice Breyer 19; Justices Kennedy and Ginsburg 16 times each; Justice Stevens 15; Justice Alito nine; and Justice Sotomayor 8.

Justice Thomas is mentioned…no times. Zero. On tape, you can’t even hear him breathing. He has a reputation for keeping quiet, but this is spooky.

Somewhere out in space, aliens are studying our justice system up close and personal. I’m not saying we want him back, but it would be nice to fill that swell Supreme Court ninth seat with someone who’ll offer a comment from time to time — even if that someone is just a talking doll.

Scott Greenfield, a New York criminal defense attorney, has this post about a unique plea bargain made by one of the smarter South Carolina DAs. A victim was allowed to administer a slap to a con man, charges were dropped, and everyone went home more or less happy.

While it’s true, as Mr. Greenfield points out, that the deal wasn’t strictly by-the-book, and the DA was disciplined for his creative solution, that solution literally smacked of fairness.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve wished former President Bush (the younger, more dimwitted one), had been brought to task for his crimes in office by pulling down his pants on national TV and having his Commander-in-Chief buttocks spanked. Then our soldiers, and the other guy’s soldiers, could have just gone home, popped a few brews, and watched justice played out on their DVRs over, and over, and over.

Saw an article today in “The Colorado Lawyer,” the journal of the state’s bar association. It’s called “Laughter – the Antidote for Those Days When You Hate Being a Lawyer.” I like laughter. There isn’t nearly enough of it, anywhere in the world. But I didn’t like the title of this article.

I’ve never had one of those days where I hate being a lawyer. There are plenty of things I hate, but that isn’t one of them. This is what I really hate:

 Police who lie on the witness stand (or anyplace else for that matter).

 District attorneys who somehow can’t look past the law to see the person who has allegedly violated that law.

 Judges whose scales of justice bend more weightily toward re-election than actual justice.

 Lawyers whose first loyalty is to their wallets rather than to their clients.

 Clients who think they can outsmart their lawyers (they probably can, but the people you want to outsmart sit on the other side of the courtroom).

And what do I really love? When I can get a cop, a DA, a judge, a lawyer, or a client to remember their humanity, and respect the long line of experiences, choices, and mistakes that brought all of them to that particular point in time we call, now.

People wonder – I’ve wondered myself – how some small children of our community come to be harmed, and sometimes even die, while under the supposed care of their parents or guardians. Today I know at least a part of the answer.

The police let them.

Yesterday I was the target of a road rage incident on Highway 36 leading into Boulder. But I wasn’t the victim. The victim was riding in the car whose driver tried to run me off the road, and then twice more to crash my car.

It happens countless times. Sixty-five to seventy miles per hour on the highway is way too leisurely for the many drivers who think eighty or more is a more satisfying pace. We even have a law that says unless you’re passing someone you’d damn well better not be going a mere sixty-five to seventy in the left lane. The law was made to protect us from the law-breakers, because in their wisdom our legislators knew the police weren’t doing it. I know one state trooper, who claims the second-highest rate of drunk driving arrests in Colorado, who says if a driver isn’t more than twenty miles over the speed limit, he won’t even bother.

No trooper was bothering the driver coming up at eighty behind me when I dared to pass another driver really poking along in the slow lane at sixty. That’s when I discovered for the umpteenth time I was better off an outlaw, because the guy came right up to my tail, bright lights furiously aflash, and stayed there till I was far enough ahead of Mr. Pokey to pull back over.

It wasn’t enough for the guy whose Indianapolis time trial I’d ruined. As he drew even with me (didn’t take long) he suddenly and violently swerved his minivan into my lane, into my car, and had I not equally suddenly and violently swerved onto the shoulder there would have been torn metal and bodies on that highway. I nearly flipped my car, and it appeared to me that the fool on the road nearly flipped his.

But I still wasn’t the victim of that man’s ill-considered rage. As I struggled to maintain control of my car, an image from inside his van flashed in my sight: a hand holding a baby bottle. There was a baby inside that van, and the driver didn’t care, or hadn’t the brain function to remember.

And then I made a mistake. I picked up my cell phone and called the police. I was furious that someone would endanger his baby that way. The police were, shall we say, less than furious. I told them where I was, to send a car to stop him, that I was following the guy. I had just been nearly killed. I thought there was a baby in that car who had also just been nearly killed. As I followed him off the highway, he again tried to crash my car by coming to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. He did it again at another intersection. I described all this to the police, as it was happening. I did not use nice language. I used words that featured the letter “F.”

The police were appalled – not that the guy was trying to kill me, or was risking killing his baby – but by my language. They told me not to follow him. How will you catch him, I said, if I don’t follow him? They didn’t have a good answer for that.

The bottom line is, that when they did finally find us, they were far more interested in why I followed him, and in my less-than Shakespearean language – they’ve obviously never read Shakespeare – than in what he had done. They said it was a shame there was a baby inside his car, but the reason he was driving 60 miles an hour up a mid-town Boulder lane was that he was afraid I might eventually catch up to him and turn him over to the police. (I only caught him, since I wouldn’t go 60 myself, because he caught a red light.) It was my fault.

They didn’t ticket him. Not for felony menacing, not for reckless driving, not for endangering his child. Children don’t do very well, by the way, with whiplash from violent maneuvers to use your car to crash somebody else. Something about their tiny little necks.

It can only be called excellent police work, if your goal is job security, to encourage this guy, or the many like him, to go out and do it again, and if there’s a child on board, hey, it’s a fun ride.

The Boulder police have some sort of motto stamped on the sides of their cars, something about “Protect and Serve.” But now that I think about it, that can’t be right.

They didn’t protect that child. I’m not sure anymore who exactly it is they serve.

Reports in the press today say the brothers of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai—reported Wednesday to be on the CIA payroll—fiercely deny the CIA claim and blame it on enemies of the Afghan regime and the New York Times.

Let’s see…if I were secretly on the payroll of the CIA, and somebody asked me, would I confirm, or deny? Hmmm.

At the Luolang Elementary School in Southern China (you’ve probably passed on the way to work and just didn’t notice), the new rules are making a bunch of little kids late to class. Every time a car goes by (and there are billions of cars in China), the tykes are required to stop and flip a snappy salute.

It isn’t clear what the punishment is for failing to touch fingers to forehead, or how many school officials are deployed to enforce the rule. What is clear, is that where cars are not really passing by, but turning in circles to drop their kids off, among the unfortunate kids frantically trying to keep arms pumping in salute among all the comings and goings, there is a noted uptick in nausea.

Another from the Darwin Awards, given annually by…someone, to salute “the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it”:

A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.

America is the only country in the civilized world, and even in the uncivilized world, to lock up people when they are children, and keep them locked up until they are dead. It’s only recently, in fact, that we have stopped ensuring that they are locked up until they are dead, by executing them.

There are a couple of cases now making the rounds of the nine men and women who wear the blackest robes in Washington that might, but I fear won’t, change this. Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida will decide whether it’s okay by the United States Constitution to give life without possibility of parole to a teenager who’s already experienced life without possibility of full maturation when he or she committed some crime or other.

It didn’t have to be a God-fearing sort of crime to land the youth behind unending bars, either. More than half of them had no prior criminal convictions when they were sentenced. Many were on the periphery of crimes that ended in homicide, but themselves didn’t even carry a weapon: they were lookouts, or doing something else they shouldn’t have been doing, when the murder occurred. One kid in California, when she was 16, killed the pimp who raped her when she was 11 and put her on the street turning tricks for him at 13. Now there’s a child who deserves never to get out of prison.

Seven men, who don’t think it’s right to give up on a human being because of crimes committed as a child, have filed a brief with the Supreme Court in these cases. Every one of them committed some crime as a child that in a different time or circumstance might have qualified them for life without parole. Every one of them redeemed himself. Every one of them believe others may be redeemed.

One of them checked into reform school at 13, and worked his way through progressively tougher joints. He killed another young man in a knife fight when he was 17, and spent a long stretch in prison, some of it in solitary confinement, where he read a play (why not; nothing else much to do in solitary) by Douglas Turner Ward that reawakened his humanity. Charles Dutton is today one of America’s most notable actors and directors.

Another of them burned down a building just for fun when he was in high school; had someone been sleeping in it, now-former United States Senator Alan Simpson, who tells the Court in his brief, “I was a monster,” might have spent the rest of his life in prison.

Another faced a possible life sentence when at 16 he stole a man’s car and wallet at gunpoint. He grew up in prison. He learned how to write there. He’s been out for four years, and R. Dwayne Betts, “not the person I was when I was locked up,” is an award-winning poet.

A fourth started his life of crime a little earlier than high school: Luis Rodriguez was seven when he became a thief. At 11 he was a gangbanger, “willing to shoot, stab and even kill for the gang.” His story of transformation, helped in part by a community that didn’t give up on him, from hopeless case to acclaimed writer, activist, and poet, is told in his brief to the Court.

A fifth stabbed a classmate at age 11 then, for good measure, stabbed the teacher who tried to break up the fight. He was only getting started. How he avoided a life of incarceration to become an Assistant United States Attorney is the subject of Terry Ray’s brief.

Yet another, T.J. Parsell, a software executive, author, and human rights activist, tells a still more harrowing story of his journey from juvenile offender to redemption.

And finally, there is the story of Ishmael Beah, who did things as a teenager far more horrific than any of the rest, and never spent a day in prison. But you should read this one for yourself.

All of their stories, in the brief to the Supreme Court, are here.

Seven stories, seven magnificent stories, of redemption. And sure, in many, many cases of young lives gone wrong, redemption seems only the naif’s hope. But as the rest of the world has already learned, it is always possible. Always.

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.

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.