LBJ 100

Happy 100th birthday, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
(I'm probably the only lawyer in my office whose house has a framed portrait of the man, right next to the one of JFK, both inherited from my Great Society Democrat father-in-law. RIP, LBJ.)

"And nobody comes to support them"

Law student Gopherlawyer has an F. Scott - inspired epiphany on a trip to juvenile detention:

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'"

ID: 3 dead in Moscow shooting

From KXLY:

Three dead, two wounded in Moscow ambush

Timeline of the ambush in Moscow

Devoted church groundskeeper killed in Moscow ambush

Updates are available from Moscow bloggers Joe Huffman ("Shooting in Moscow Idaho," "Pictures from Moscow Idaho Shootings") and Submariner Dale ("Five shot, three dead in 'ambush'," "In Memory of First Presbyterian Church sexton Paul Bauer," "In Memory of Les Newbill: Husband, father, former Army Officer").

From the BBC:

Three killed in Idaho shootings - Three people have been killed and two wounded in a sniper attack in the town of Moscow, Idaho

From the New York Times:

Gunman Kills Officer in Idaho Courthouse

From the Seattle Times:

Church prays for shooting victims — including gunman

(besides going to the courthouse for legal aid clinic in third year, in my first year of law school I lived in an apartment on Van Buren right across from the church, as did Heather K. Poor Moscow)

A smaller loss, still a loss

The day we got home from Idaho, our little grey cat Miss Kitty greeted us at the door, walked outside (which she hardly ever did) to see the grass and the sky, sat with us all evening in the living room consenting to be petted by the three of us, then when it was time to turn in for the night, excused herself and went to sleep under the bed in the spare room. That's where I found her the next day.

I imagine that the last days of terrible heat were too much for an 18-year-old cat, no matter how plucky. We had a cat sitter and food and water and all for her and Bubba, who is resting by me as I type this, yet it wasn't enough. It seems she had been ailing and fading a long time. It's as though Miss Kitty hung on until her family came home, and checked out peacefully only once we had returned.

She was a saucy but graceful animal. She adopted my father-in-law when she was a young cat of the streets, meowing for three days under his window until it rained and he let her in. Once there, they became fast friends. He named her Krazy Kat, and she embraced dogs, lawyers, and other creatures. When my father-in-law died, she mourned along with us, spending five months in our basement until she decided it was time to come up again. She delighted in walking under my shepherd / heeler's nose and nibbling on my son's hair. She taught my boy life lessons about gentleness and respect (I think the scratch by his right cheekbone is from her!), and my heart broke watching his heart break when I told him the news.

I miss the little cat. I'm grateful she stayed around to say good-bye.

Update: to end this on a grace note, a story from Bellingham about a dying cat finding an unlikely friend (thank you for that, WoT), and audio from NPR - Andrei Codrescu speaking about a special cat, with special lessons.

WA: front page kudos for departing p.d.

From the Tacoma News Tribune (site may require registration):

It’s ‘the end of an era’ as defender retires - Attorney Jack Hill made a long career out of representing Pierce County’s indigent

For more than 30 years, Jack Hill has had a job many people wouldn’t want. He’s led Pierce County’s Department of Assigned Counsel, defending people charged with crimes who often are politically unpopular to defend – men, women and children who can’t afford to pay for an attorney.

Despite the challenges, Hill will retire at the end of the month from a job he thinks has been – and still is – great. “I still like to come in the door,” he said recently. Friday, the 56-year-old father of four will walk out that door at 949 Market St. for the last time...

“It’s a moral commitment at a constitutional level to make sure the system is fair,” he said. “The constitution doesn’t say you have to prosecute people. It says you have the right to counsel. The constitution is about protecting us from government...”

Hill said having a heart operation in the early 1990s made him lose his love of conflict in the courtroom. “This business takes a toll on you that you can’t quantify,” Hill said. “The practice of law – at least criminal law – has not become kinder and gentler. … Living in litigation is as stressful a situation as anything, short of war.”

Since then he’s spent less time as a trial lawyer and more time trying, through cases and lobbying, to reform the law... “Maybe I’m just a social worker at heart,” Hill said...

For want of a defibrilator

A few blogs have mentioned the lonesome death of criminal defense lawyer Tom Farris:

Lawyer dies while arguing case in N.C. courtroom

A defense lawyer died of an apparent heart attack Thursday while arguing a drunken driving case in a Wake County courtroom.

Tom Farris, 57, of Wilson, collapsed about 11:30 a.m. and died despite efforts to resuscitate him in the courtroom...

TalkLeft suggests, "This isn't the way most of us want to die."

There are worse ways, certainly, and some days I think there'd be nothing like going out in harness, like my father-in-law, rest him, who was arguing with opposing counsel in chambers that morning, and was gone by that afternoon. Honorable. But then my wife cuts through the legal warrior b.s. and reminds me how it was to watch the paramedics work over him on the floor of his office, and I'm anchored again to the hope for a full life and a happy death.

This commenter on TalkLeft could be describing my father-in-law and the legions of other solos and small business toilers like him:

...Most lawyers don't make enough to pay for health insurance or to restrict their business when they aren't feeling well.

I know of 4 lawyers who have died in court- either in trial or during a motion hearing. Since I have never seen a criminal defense lawyer retire, I am shocked the numbers are so low.

Peace, peace, you lions: Tom Farris, Lloyd Walker, and all the colleagues who've died too soon.

Mediocre p.d.'s need love too

Thank you to Erik for e-mailing me this great public defender story. Not great as in, this is a profile of a great p.d., or, this story is great for public defenders and our image in general. Instead, "great" as in how the reporter gets inside the skin of a "nobody" who's not a particularly great lawyer and takes us for a walk in his world:

The $40 Lawyer - In his own defense

"After passing the Bar exam on his fourth try, Charley Demosthenous wasn't exactly a hot property. Even his father thought he should go sell screwdrivers. Representing the poor and miserable was his last chance to be somebody."

This one's for the non true believers, for the ones among us who never wanted to be public defenders, but were given a chance:

At 27, two years out of law school and a year out of steady work... no one's eager to hire an inexperienced attorney who finished near the bottom of his class and failed the Florida Bar exam three times...

"Why do you want to be a public defender?" he is asked. "The State Attorney's Office wasn't hiring," he answers.

The bosses at the Public Defender's Office love an underdog. They know the qualities that make a good PD are more elusive than what a test can measure. Besides, the job burns lawyers out so fast - they stay about three years, on average - that they need a constant stream of new ones. They take a chance on Charley Demosthenous.

As he goes, he grows:

It's not that he has become a True Believer overnight... He's not like Lily McCarty, the apple-cheeked 24-year-old PD in his division who hugs her clients and cries for their terrible upbringings. This job was her Plan A, a way to practice social work with a law license.

Charley's different. Yes, he fights for his clients' future. But with every trial, every argument, his own future feels at stake. In his mind, the options remain stark: Be somebody, or be nobody.

What's more, he realizes, he just hates losing. He takes it personally. He has had enough for a lifetime...

There is so much insight and attention to detail in this story, it's as if the reporter is giving away some of our secret not-so-noble motivations:

From the defense side, it's easy to despise what seems an air of privilege and hauteur around the opposing table. The young prosecutors believe God is on their side...

Or at least that's how it feels from across the room. It doesn't help that whereas PDs look like ordinary people, by and large, their state attorney counterparts are uncommonly good-looking, the kind that used to make classmates feel weird or fat or gangly. Beating the state becomes sweet on so many levels.

Some months back, in another courtroom, a young female prosecutor struck the PDs as particularly snooty and unreasonable. The PDs decided to teach her a lesson. They swamped her with depositions, besieged her with motions, double-teamed her at trial. They kept up the barrage until, one day in open court, she dissolved in wretched sobs. Point made. And even if it wasn't, it felt good to do it...

Dang. Read this remarkable article, and hope there'll be a Part 2.

Bonus links: this article is being discussed, here, here, here, and here. And on Fark, headlined "Terrible law student matures into terrible lawyer. Here is his story.", tons of comments:

"It's like teaching, social work or the clergy. It doesn't work if you're just doing it until something better comes along."

Update: Welcome visitors from ACS Blog! There are many more entertaining and interesting reactions to the article via Metafilter:

"PD is a tough job. The workload is almost always twice what any human can bear, so stuff goes undone. Yet the cause is noble as the defendants need an advocate as they negotiate their way through a legal system where the odds are stacked against them... I think a lot of the PDs fall into it like Charley, it is one of their last options, yet I still have a lot of respect for them and the good they do for society. For all that, society looks down on them, perceives them not as defenders of the downtrodden but shysters looking to allow criminals to escape justice. Go Charley."

What did we ever do to Father Drinan?

I 've never had anything against Robert F. Drinan, S.J., even looked up to him in the past. Sadly, he can't make some otherwise valid points about the problem of over-incarceration without getting off a drive-by slur against p.d.'s:

The quadrupling of prisoners in the United States in one generation has occurred silently and surreptitiously, with no mass protests. A few civil-rights groups have complained, but hundreds of thousands of suspects have been allowed by their public defenders to plead guilty and to serve extended sentences in jail.

"Allowed"? Bless me, Father, but some of them may have sinned. Drinan's a Jebbie and a law professor no less, and ostensibly politically close to many of us who do the p.d. thing down here in this broken stacked-deck system, so Professor, I'm listening: what might be the alternative to "allowing" our clients to exercise the choice of pleading or going to trial? Shall we set everyone for trial, even the people who want to plead? Shall I put you down for being on jury duty every day until you die?

(some days I just want to tell my liberal and progressive allies, "be quiet and let me do my work in peace.")

John Adams, p.d. for the damned

In Coeur d' Alene, Idaho, the man accused of kidnapping Shasta Groene and murdering her family has at least one other human being standing beside him:

In the face of intense media coverage as well as vocal and often vitriolic suggestions as to how his client ought to be treated, Kootenai County Public Defender John Adams would not say if he thinks his client can get a fair trial here.

"I believe this city is a sophisticated city, and I believe the people... for the most part believe in the rule of law," he said, "and that justice is meted out in the courtrooms and not in our streets."

Adams would not say if he would seek to move the trial out of the area...

...Steve Groene, the father of Shasta and Dylan, said while he would wish to see Duncan die if he's convicted of the crimes, he would agree to the man making a plea deal which would result in life in prison if it meant Shasta would be spared from having to testify.

"Nobody wants to see Shasta traumatized in any fashion," Adams said after being told of Groene's feelings. "I applaud Mr. Groene's courage standing up for his family."

Raskolnikov

Thanks to Jon DKLN for this link from the Washington Post about Andy Mickel, a young cop killer who passed this way.

In November 2002, Officer David Mobilio was shot outside Red Bluff, CA. Six days later, this post appeared on various indy-media sites:

"Hello Everyone, my name's Andy. I killed a Police Officer in Red Bluff, California in a motion to bring attention to, and halt, the police-state tactics that have come to be used throughout our country. Now I'm coming forward, to explain that this killing was also an action against corporate irresponsibility."

Now he's in a death penalty trial, representing himself with the same mixture of delusion and conceit:

In his opening statement to the jury, the Associated Press reported that Mickel said, "I want to tell you that I did ambush and kill David Mobilio." The police officer's widow was weeping in the courtroom. Mickel did not express remorse. He has pled not guilty. He promised to provide his side during the trial. Mickel is scheduled to begin his defense on Tuesday. "I'm going to have to tell you that stuff later," he told the jury. "I don't have a sound-bite defense."

Whatever he thought his defense might have been - maybe the necessity defense of "I had to shoot the father of a toddler three times, twice in the back and once in the head, in order to prevent a greater evil" or the general defense of "Just let me tell you my side of the story," it appears that the judge shut him down on Friday. Now he will present no defense at all.

Closing arguments are today. Those in my line of work will be interested in reading about the laissez-faire job Mickel's "advisory counsel" is doing. Remember, this is a cop-killer case, death penalty eligible.

On his way to becoming a murderous little creep, Mickel went to The Evergreen State College, here in the South Sound. My neighbors have been following his case in The Olympian since it started. It was good to see the WaPo article giving a little snapshot of Oly and TESC life as background, while not taking the easy "Evergreen made him a killer" route. That boy wasn't right long before he came out West. It's an intriguing article, capped by an interview with Mickel. The author ventures:

It is as if Mickel, in his thinking, had gone so far to the fringe left that he started to look a lot like the fringe right.

Fine as far as that goes, but I don't think these high-level threateners of lawful authority are on the "fringe" of the right. Man, these are sad days for fans of the rule of law, left, right, or center.

Update: Prosecutor closes with dramatic re-enactment of ambush

Update: Mickel guilty.
After deliberating the charges against defendant Andrew Mickel for 30 minutes a jury of six men and six woman returned Tuesday afternoon with a verdict of guilty and found a special allegation of murdering a police officer to be true.

Update 4/6/05:
Convicted cop-killer Andrew Mickel told a jury in the penalty phase of his trial today that he killed Red Bluff Police Officer David Mobilio out of “patriotism” and said the action was necessary and justified.

Bonus equal-opportunity (non-DeLay) scoundrel links: Seattle Independent Media Center posts and comments about Mickel here and here, and coincidentally, here's the latest from seattle.indymedia.org:

Kristian Williams, author of the book "Our Enemies in Blue" and a member of Rose City Cop Watch in Portland, will be speaking at Western Washington University Monday, April 11th...
“Well-concieved , well-researched, and well-written,
Our Enemies in Blue deserves a truly wide
and deep readership.” - Mumia Abu-Jamal

(Yes, the same Mumia whose taped voice was featured in that graduation happening / publicity stunt at Evergreen a few years back.)

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

old courthouse











The U-Haul is packed, more or less, the DI truck has left, and in an hour or so, I'll be off on the next installment of the adventure. I'll be back in a week for cats, in two weeks for wife, son, and dogs. I'm leaving this place where I married, where  my wife and son

were born, where my father-in-law, rest him, died in harness two hours after a pre-trial, and where somehow I came to rest and stayed put for the longest stretch of time since high school.

I first set foot in the old courthouse back in 1995, the day before my wedding. Months before, I'd applied for a job with the federal defenders, the first in a series of fool's errands to that august body.
(typical state court p.d. (center) interviews with federal p.d. (right) to bemusement of man of action (left))

They rejected me, and not for the last time, but sent my CV on to various Idaho chief p.d.'s who might have lower standards, including the chief in Twin, who invited me to interview. I'd found a job I liked in Washington State by then, as a prosecutor alas, but a civil prosecutor at least, but I figured, I'll be in town for a wedding, so what the heck, it'll be good juju for the future. What an odd day. I got the marriage license, met with the guy (who maybe didn't have the best people skills and surely would've fired my *ss within a year), ducked my ex-girlfriend the criminal defense lawyer in the parking lot, and drove around town buying mixed nuts and mints for the reception and listening to Kurdt Cobain yowling, "married...buried...yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." The wedding was much more fun.

Somehow I must have intuited that I'd be back, and since April 1998, here I've been. My boy Joe arrived in 1999, in time to meet his grandfather. My practice became exceedingly interesting: I befriended a few murderers, I saw others recover, I made a few stands and won a few trials though I let down a few other defendants, but in general felt I could hold my head up when running into old clients at the grocery outlet. I'm proud that want ads under my by-line said "Class standing is less important than commitment and a sense of humor." I had some remarkable colleagues with smarts and heart at the Twin Falls County Public Defenders Office. You know who you are. If you don't know who you are, thank you Jon O., Paulie, Tony, Casey, Denise, Wells, Robert, Julia, Brett, Robin C., Bryan, Christa, Jack, L. Scott, Sandra, Charles, Teri, Ben, Susan, Robin W., Chris, Brody, and Marilyn. I leave an orphaned placeholder of a website to whoever can figure out how to update it. I haven't exactly finished my course, but I am taking it on the road now.

Consequently, this site will be going radio silent for a couple of weeks or so while I learn the ropes of my new posting. So it's farewell, Idaho, my old antagonist and friend, until we meet again.

We're all in this together

David Neiwart at Orcinus has another well-written invitation to the Democratic Party and the 40% or so of us rural Red Staters to reconcile and reason together, with some charitable things to say about Idaho, our former governor Cecil Andrus, and the Blaine County D's up the road who raised hundreds of thousands for Kerry in one event without so much as a personal thank-you. He also linked to this line I can use in the future if I ever catch any Seattle attitude: "If you're gonna cop that attitude about people who live in red states, count me among the red staters. That's not just an abstract, Niemollerian stance: I have more in common with them than I do with most of you."

I think both writers would have liked my father-in-law Lloyd Walker, G d rest him, a son of a butcher and grandson of Blaine County hard-rock miners, who chaired the Idaho Democratic Party back in the glory days. Early on, he told our senator Frank Church to remember the average Idahoan and not tie himself too tightly to the Ivy League crowd (and to tweak your assumptions, my father-in-law was a graduate of Harvard College and HLS). A whole history of might-have-beens would be written if the lunch-bucket Democrats, the tree-huggers and the technocrats had held it together against the common foe. If the DLC types are serious about rebuilding the party, maybe they can listen to the West for a change. They could start by reading Orcinus.

Idaho headlines

- In McGriff v. McGriff, a child custody case of some national notoriety, the Idaho Supreme Court yesterday ruled that while "sexual orientation, in and of itself, cannot be the basis for awarding or removing custody," the state Supremes took the trial judge's word for it that the father Theron's homosexuality had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his decision regarding custody and visitation, and upheld the award of physical and legal custody to the mother, Shawn.

Kidwell, J., dissented:
A review of the record, the pleadings and oral argument before this Court make it clear that Theron’s sexual orientation was wrongfully taken into consideration by the lower court and now the majority opinion. This should not be the law of Idaho and is undesirable public policy...(I)t is unusual and cause for legal concern, that the magistrate reached for reasons to help Shawn succeed in her claim when the primary reason stated in her petition to modify custody, homosexuality, is not a legally permissible consideration.

- Meanwhile, the Twin Falls Times-News reports on a Jerome County murder case with a headline guaranteed to increase local appreciation of defendants' constitutional and procedural safeguards: Suspect in murder case walks. "This is not the first time the case against (Iovany) Vazquez has been dismissed. On Sept. 8, the case against Vazquez was dismissed but prosecutors refiled almost immediately and Vazquez was not released from jail. A lack of physical evidence was cited in the Sept. 8 court minutes as the reason for that dismissal." Attorneys Ray Pena and Keith Roark represent Vasquez.

- In Idaho Falls, a public defender struggled to get a kidnapping defendant out of the courtroom while the client announced,
"Why do you care about the things that built me into who I am? Read my profile as I turn blue in the hands 'cause these cuffs are cutting off my circulation. I'm hurting, I'm facing a life sentence."

- Two Seattle men have been charged with the murder of starting cornerback for the U of I Vandals, Eric McMillan, 19. McMillan was shot dead in Moscow on Sunday. Two suspects were arrested after a police chase halfway across the State of Washington.

- Oh, and Brody and his client got a verdict today: guilty.