I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I’ll try not to use too many names here, because the only one involved who used the name his mother gave him was the guy murdered thirty years ago. The collection of hip-hop, rap, and gang names present at the drive-by killing of Tupac Shakur in 1996 is plain too confusing to be spoken or even written by a seventy-eight-year-old Colorado criminal defense lawyer.

Police were unable to prove who killed the rapper all these years. So yesterday the only survivor of the four possible killers proved it for them. Defense lawyers begged the jury not to believe their client, Duane Davis — not for what he testified in the courtroom — but for what he said repeatedly in the three decades before trial.

He said plenty.

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Yesterday was a bad day for a couple of American presidents.

Lenín Moreno, forty-sixth president of Ecuador who left office in 2021 with more money than he was supposed to, got five years in prison for taking an Austin Powers sum of “one million dollars” in bribes.

Donald Trump, who by numerical quirk sandwiches Moreno by being the forty-fifth and forty-seventh presidents of the United States, and is just getting started with close to two billion dollars in grift in his second term, also had a bad day.

Nothing to do with fiscal corruption; merely moral rot.

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Well, so long, Dolly. Say hello to Louis. Take your coat, stay warm.

And promise, promise you’ll never go away again.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Let her rot in her (actually quite comfy) jail suite

Ghislaine Maxwell lost another possibly half-hearted bid for release from prison yesterday. She’s the dear lady who in her carefree youth helped arrange the clearly statutory and often forcible rapes of teenaged girls (and perhaps a pre-teen or two) by Jeffrey Epstein and a horde of horrid rich and powerful suspects, including one we’ve twice elected to keep those women in their place.

I say “half-hearted” because she’s enjoying a much cozier confinement than before she met with now Attorney General Todd Blanche for nine hours last summer to get straight what she might tell Congress about the now U.S. president’s involvement (if any, if any) with those little girls when he was a callow youth of forty-eight.

A week after her chummy chat with Blanche, the federal government moved her from her Tallahassee prison digs, to a Bryan, Texas, minimum-security prison camp. Its own rules prohibit that sweet deal for a sex offender, and the camp’s warden says she’s the only one there.

And it is kind of like camp. No walls; a fence designed to keep the curious out, not the prisoners in. No bars. No cells; she lives in a dorm. Not much concrete; lawns, shady trees, strolling paths, softball, volleyball — no word on pickleball. Table games, movie nights, music, and arts & crafts.

The food is better, but not cordon-bleu, though a whistleblower says prison staff prepare customized meals and deliver them to her; Congress is investigating — don’t want her eating better than they are.

Oh, and what did Maxwell say about Trump after talking with his favorite fixer?

Told Blanche she barely knew the guy. Seemed like a real nice gentleman.

Told Congress nothing. Took the fifth. Her lawyer said she would be happy to say more nice things about Donald if he would just grant her clemency.

Donald’s still thinking about that.

No, Donny, you can’t deny visas to black folk

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Japan Today reported this morning — maybe yesterday afternoon, or tomorrow evening; I never did get the International Date Line — that police are keen to catch a crook who left more than a trail of breadcrumbs in a national park.

They left the whole loaf. Loaves. So far, eighty loaves of bread along a road through Tottori Prefecture’s Daisen-Oki National Park. Except for the culinary eyesore, the park is one of the most beautiful in western Japan.

Police say the bread is a menace. For one thing, these are not tiny little Dave’s Thin Bread loaves. These things are bricks that could ruin an unsuspecting runner’s whole day. For another, worse thing, these are magnets for bears looking to slap something meaty between two slices.

So local keisatsu are on high alert to catch whoever’s been dumping the bread, and shoo away any bears on even higher alert to catch a little baked dough.

And if by chance or divine plan Jesus ever does decide to visit this planet again, he, she, or they better not start in Japan and try that loaves and fishes thing.

It could mean five years in jail. Plus side, plenty of time to gather twelve new apostles.

“I’m very good at flagpoles.”

— Donald Trump 19 August 2026

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

If you use your TV as eyes through which to see the world from time to time, this is going to be perfect for you. Enjoy the trip.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Want vindictive? You got vindictive!

In May, a federal judge dismissed a belated criminal charge against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported in 2025 to a notoriously vicious El Salvador prison. U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw ruled the charge of human smuggling, based on a traffic stop three years earlier, was presumptively vindictive, “an abuse of prosecuting power.”

Judge Crenshaw found that the Justice Department would never have brought the charge had Abrego Garcia not successfully challenged what was essentially a government kidnaping and won back his freedom.

On Monday the feds, which these days seem to commit more crimes than they successfully prosecute, appeared to prove the judge right. The DOJ asked the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Judge Crenshaw and reinstate the criminal charges.

Giving the Sixth, of course, a chance to give the DOJ what it wants and say sure, the judge got it wrong.

It wasn’t just presumptive vindictiveness: it was actual vindictiveness.

Go fish

My mother was from Texas, so it’s embarrassing when that state’s governor pretends to be so stupid on the law.

He must be pretending, because before he was governor, he was attorney general of Texas. Before that, a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Before that, a state district judge in Harris County. I don’t know for sure, but he must have gotten a law degree sometime around there.

Yet just yesterday, the state of Minnesota had to sue Texas to get Greg Abbott to remember his first-year Con Law class and release a fugitive his own Texas Rangers arrested to be tried up in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.

The fugitive, a typically undertrained ICE agent named Christian Castro, shot a man inside his own house in Minneapolis in January. Castro claimed the man, a Venezuelan legally in the United States, had attacked him with a shovel and broomstick just before. The local funeral home must have appropriated one of the weapons, and Glinda the Good flown away on the other, because neither appears in video evidence of what actually happened.

Abbott has been sitting on the extradition warrant (sounds more uncomfortable than it is) for eighty-three days now. Says he’ll sign the warrant when Minnesota does something about its own welfare fraud.

As I’ve heard many a judge ask a lawyer in court, “Do you have a legal argument, counsellor?”

Abbott does not. Extradition is mandatory under the Constitution (Abbott, to be fair, may have missed class that day), federal statute, Supreme Court decision, and — oh, yeah — Texas law.

Abbott has till next Wednesday to follow the law.

One last chance to make my mother proud.

God hates ICE, too

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

A Florida man driving with his knees pressed together was racing up Interstate 95 the other day at one hundred seventeen miles an hour when a Brevard County sheriff’s deputy waved a checkered flag at him.

Where’s the fire, the deputy asked.

In my pants, the now sweating motorist said. Got to get to Buc-ee’s, fast; they got the cleanest bathrooms.

An hour up the road, the deputy said.

Nah, I can get there in thirty minutes.

Speed you were going, sure. I got a better idea.

So the deputy arrested him for reckless driving and took him to a much closer bathroom.

Made it just in time.

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

By the most conservative figure, more than ten thousand people have been murdered in Iran since 13 January when Donald Trump told them to “keep protesting” and promised “help is on its way.”

By any reckoning, American help is still putting on its pants. What help has been given civilians there through the April ceasefire has taken seventeen hundred of their lives, including more than two hundred fifty children.

Other estimates place the protestors’ death toll far higher.

All those are the extrajudicial killings. Iranian courts, where due process includes complimentary torture before requisite confession, have taken the lives of scores more, including the latest execution just yesterday.

Also yesterday, the Iranian parliament approved a framework for legislation that would make it a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison, for citizens to give interviews to media the government considers hostile — somethin…

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Everybody needs a vacation, especially, I so selfishly feel, these days. So unless I just can’t resist, I’ll see you on the other side of mid-August.

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Guess we never shoulda made those cuts to the U.S. Geological Survey (Cf. U.S. government map of Africa; See Brazil conference)

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[Editor’s Note: The Danish lawyer Henrik Karl Nielsen has long felt more than a geopolitical connection with Greenland. His fight to compensate the Inughuit people forcibly relocated from their homes in 1953, sixteen years before he was born, so the United States could enlarge Thule Air Base, was one of his first cases. It became one of the most important indigenous rights cases in modern Danish legal history. He was later appointed defense counsel there.

So he’s always felt a little protective of Greenland and its people. I wrote to ask him his view of the American president’s persistent threat to take Greenland as his own, by buying it or stealing it by force. The following was his kind reply, yesterday.]

I visited Thule (North Greenland) three times in 1997. At that time, I was one of the counsels assigned to represent the Inuit…

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Next time, just vote already

Vance Boelter murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and tried to murder state Senator John Hoffman and members of his family.

Last Thursday, on the assassin’s fifty-ninth birthday, a federal judge gave him some time to think about it.

Two consecutive life sentences, plus forty years just to make sure. Happy fifty-ninth.

Both of Boelter’s political targets, and the nearly fifty others he planned to murder, were Democrats.

Nothing to do, of course, with the president of the United States calling the Democratic Party “the greatest enemy America has.”

Nothing at all.

ICE monsters

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I don’t think there’s a law that says if you knowingly, recklessly, and willfully lie about the history of the United States, then to the dungeon with you. If there were, our favorite president would already be picking lice out of his hair.

(Of course, he’s committed enough real crimes to make one wonder if that would ever really happen, but that’s another ten thousand stories.)

Donald Trump has ordered warning signs installed at the entrance to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. They say the history depicted inside is biased and inaccurate.

He did this because Smithsonian officials refused to rewrite their exhibits to suit him. Trump wanted them to replace history with lies he would prefer to see there. Too much slavery; too little Creator. I may be mistaken in assuming he does not mean himself.

He accuses them of failing to “appropriately honor” the signers of the Declaration of Independenc…

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

One hundred twenty-five years ago, a bank clerk named William Porter finished a three-year holiday in an Ohio prison for embezzling from his employer. A guard, as guards everywhere do, told him, you’ll be back.

He did not come back. Instead he wrote “The Gift of the Magi,” and three hundred other short stories. Like Mark Twain, he used a pen name; his was O. Henry.

The stories often contained endings with surprising twists.

Surprising twists, like his own life.

When we think about the people we lock up, often for long times for nonviolent offenses, we might remember that.

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

It sounds a little peculiar to say a piece of music, described by one critic as a love song about U.S. complicity in Central American torture regimes, is hauntingly lovely. Yet it is.

But we’re going to need another genius to write another song for our time, because now we’ve got one of our own.

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

A little fun for the president

Donald Trump took some time off last week from killing immigrants on our streets and plotting wars against Cuba and Greenland to honor newly reported American war dead by grinningly leaning into a picture of the jubilant Spanish football team raising their World Cup trophy.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino surprisingly showed limits on how hard he will suck up to the man, and ran past the whole team to try and pull Trump out of the photo. The Guardian newspaper shot a different view of him doing that, and captioned it, “Gianni Infantino carefully explains to Donald Trump that he is not part of the Spanish national team.”

If an American photographer had written that they’d win the Pulitzer Prize.

The Spanish team, FIFA, and probably everybody else resolved the embarrassing intrusion into the young men’s moment by simply cutting President Trump out of the picture.

Wish we could do that.

Short Timer

U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff may have set a new American record for shortest time on the job. Fifty-four minutes into his tenure he was fired.

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I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

A Moroccan rap star, whose lyrics taunted the government to go ahead and take him and throw him into prison, has been taken by the government and thrown into prison.

It isn’t clear whether Mehdi El Youbi, who performs as Mehdi Black Wind, is being prosecuted for offending the king, the crown prince, or some other royal brat.

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