Probable Cause

I haven’t posted much lately, I know.  To be frank, I’ve considered just taking down my blogs.  I’ve struggled with the decision as to what to do — and tried to understand why I feel the way that I feel.  It’s not that I don’t have things to say: I’ve written numerous posts.  I just never complete them because, well…it hardly seems worth it. 

Our system is irrevocably broken.  Nothing short of a new Revolution would fix it.  And I’m not at all sure the Americans of today can fix it even then.  We can only, at best, tear down the present Tyranny. 

And why is that? 

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Being a criminal defense attorney is not the easiest job I could have chosen.  In many ways, it’s the hardest.  I am, unfortunately, an idealist of the worst sort.  I believe in The Law.  I do not believe The Law should be broken.

Why, then, do I “defend criminals”?

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The only American President ever elected to more than two terms — he would die at the start of his fourth term as President — Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously stated in the Inaugural Address to his first term his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Unlike today’s politicians, Roosevelt was all about quelling irrational fear. Whatever you might think about the specifics of his politics and plans, Roosevelt seriously wanted to improve society and thus tried to ameliorate fear by making us believe “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Those in power today want to keep us in a constant state of fear. They’ve turned scaring us into a highly-successful, hugely-profitable (for them) art form.

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Today, I’m going to play a little game called, “Let’s All Be Pat Robertson.”

A few days ago, I wrote about a group from San Diego called Better Courts Now, which was running four conservative “Christian” judges against incumbents.  As I noted (and quoted) there, they believed God called them and told them to change out a few judges.

I disagreed.  And apparently God supports my view of limited government and judges who do not rule in a way that favors a particular religion.

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When the United States of America was founded, one of the keystones of our nation was the establishment of an independent judiciary.

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Defense attorneys — and on rare occasions even prosecutors or judges — frequently bemoan the fact that those meant to enforce our laws do not always play fair.  We complain about things like police states. We complain about things like the loss of civil liberties, including the right to a fair trial. We complain about the gradual erosion of the United States Constitution and the fact that the so-called “parchment barriers”¹ therein contained against the abuses of the government which that document constituted are, these days, less strong even than that.

Most people, however, upon hearing this think, “Ahhh…those damn defense attorneys.  Always coddling criminals.” (more…)

1. James Madison, one of the Founders of the United States, once argued against a “Bill of Rights” because he felt it was a “parchment barrier” against abuses by a government.  Sometimes, I think that if he’d won out, we might be better off; Jefferson felt that “[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  Jefferson said this blood was liberty’s “natural manure” and said, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” [↩]

There are days when I feel like tossing in the towel.  The system we’ve built — the one I work in, the one we’ve arbitrarily decided to call the “justice” system — is so utterly destructive of our society that it almost feels criminal to do anything at all that allows it to continue to exist.  It does not feel fixable.  It feels very much like the only real option is to either move on in the realization that I will never recover from law school, that the money spent on that “education” is gone, and there is nothing I can do about it.

Will it matter when I’m gone that I fought a case to a pointless and unfair conviction?  I don’t know.

Certainly, I’m not the only attorney out there doing what I do.  At least, I don’t think I am.  But sometimes I wonder.

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Cops lie.

If you haven’t the moral courage to hear that and consider what should be done about it, then go somewhere else: you’re not going to be happy reading this blog post.  (Be sure to stay away from Injustice Everywhere, too.)

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When I was a kid, we had a lot more freedom.  Our nation had this little document — a document which was primarily responsible for the fact that we became a great nation — called the Constitution of the United States.  In it were encoded and enshrined the guiding principles of our nation.

As kids, we used our freedom to explore, to poke and prod, to dissect.  As we got a little bit older — but we were still kids — we used our freedom to make out, some going so far as to make love and even to (after a fashion) make war.  We sometimes got into fights with other kids.  We sometimes — either deliberately or accidentally — blew things up.  I remember I once accidentally set fire to a battleship by firing missiles shooting matches at it.

Apparently model glue and plastic are quite flammable.

I managed to get the fire out before it spread.  But I could not get the lump that had been the battleship to come unstuck from the floor — it melded with the linoleum — and I could not hide the smell.

Boy, did I get a whipping!

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I’ve been in a kind of funk the last couple of days.

Nothing serious.  I don’t have to be imprisoned (at least not for the funk).  But the same cannot be said for some of my clients when their own mental machinery is out of whack.

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