Le Procureur Soleil de la Republique?

KHOU-TV put up PDFs of some of Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal’s emails here and here. It turns out that Chuck uses (or was using) the email address “l’etat@dao.hctx.net”. How very Louis XIV.

Government’s Talents

The state is bad — wasteful, inefficient, and incompetent — at almost everything it tries to do. There are two exceptions that I can think of:

• First, making war, which is the application of violence against the citizens of another state.

• Second, prosecuting crimes, which is the application of violence against its own citizens.

If it doesn’t have to do with the use or threatened use of force, government stinks at it. (Whether government should be in the business of doing things that it does badly is a separate question. I would say that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.)

Chuck’s Apology

This came out today, in response to the events I discussed here:

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Chuck Rosenthal
Friday, December 28, 2007
713-755-5810

Statement by Chuck Rosenthal

Recently some Harris County District Attorney inner office emails have been released in the media.

I understand that I have said some things that have caused pain and difficulty for my family, my coworkers and friends. I deeply regret having said those things. Moreover, I am sorry for the problems I have caused anyone.

I also understand that sometimes things happen for a purpose. This event has served as a wake-up call to me to get my house in order both literally and figuratively.

Charles A. “Chuck” Rosenthal
Harris County District Attorney

I commend Chuck for owning up (not the best apology, but not bad for a politician), and hope that “get my house in order” means “stop punishing others for violating morals that even I (being, after all, human) can’t follow” rather than “redouble my efforts to hold myself to the moral standards that I impose on others less fortunate.”

(By the way, “literally”? Doesn’t “get my house in order” literally mean “tidy up my living space”? Also by the way, might they have been interoffice emails rather than inner office? And, while I’m picking nits, the parallelism in the second paragraph is incomplete — should be “my friends”. Mayhap Chuck was kissing his secretary behind her right ear while dictating the letter?)

Your Tax Dollars at Waste

Here’s a little treasure, HR 1955, The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which passed the House of Representatives in October “under a suspension of the rules to cut debate short and pass the bill.” (PDF.)

Others see it as sinister; I don’t . . . yet. It would merely create a “National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” (yawn) and a “Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States” (snore).

Here’s the highlight, as far as I’m concerned.

The term “homegrown terrorism” means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

So when the State of Texas (a group operating primarily within the United States) threatens to put murderers to death (the threatened use of violence) so that potential murderers (a segment of the civilian population of the United States) will not murder people (in furtherance of the social objective of having fewer murders), it’s committing homegrown terrorism.

Moreover, since every penal law is backed by the threatened use of force or violence and is intended to coerce or intimidate civilians in furtherance of political or social objectives (less crime), everybody on the government’s side in a criminal case becomes a party to homegrown terrorism. I think that’s neat.

Neater: it would also make every athlete in every contact sport a homegrown terrorist. Probably not the result that Congress intended, but as far as I know nobody ever accused Congress of being smart.

David Tarrell is . . .

Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year

Lawyers Appreciate . . . The U.S. Constitution

My friend Scott Greenfield has tagged me for the Second Annual Lawyers Appreciate Meme, which started at Life at the Bar.

I appreciate the U.S. Constitution.

The Founders knew — from direct experience — that government is a threat to freedom. The saw that government was necessary, though, or at least inevitable. So, rather than leave the form of the government to chance, they created one, making it as weak as they thought it could be while still performing its fundamental duties, and wrote down how it was supposed to work. The Constitution is the leash the Founders put on the beast of Government. (Not a strong enough metaphor . . . .) It’s the pentacle the Founders drew on the floor before summoning the demon of Government.

Not all lawyers appreciate the U.S. Constitution. For every lawyer arguing for an interpretation of the Constitution that would preserve human freedom, there is a lawyer on the other side arguing for an interpretation that would diminish human freedom to the benefit of governmental power.

The meme says I’m supposed to tag three people. So here are three who, I know, appreciate the U.S. Constitution:

Robert Guest (I Was the State)

Stephen Gustitis (Texas Criminal Defense Lawyer)

Jamie Spencer (Austin Criminal Defense)

Okay, but why the RIGHT ear?

I am not one inclined to judge the morals of others. Who a prosecutor is lusting after (committing “adultery in his heart”, as Jimmy Carter might say) is not something I consider to be my business, or anyone else’s, except . . .

Except that the prosecutor in question is the individual who orders the DA’s office’s policy not to agree to less than 10 days in jail for any person (hooker, hustler, or john) charged with prostitution. The prosecutor in question? Elected Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal (who, incidentally, describes the path to lethal injection as “the pipeline“).

According to an article by the Houston Chronicle’s Brian Rogers, Chuck is fighting in federal court to keep secret his emails (from his county email account, which would make them generally subject to the Texas Public Information Act), in which he kanoodles virtually with his executive secretary, with whom he had an affair in the 1980s. (Chuck says that he told his current wife, whom he married in 1991, about the affair before hiring Stevens as his executive assistant when he took office in 2000.)

“While the 51 e-mails between the two contain the phrase ‘I love you’ more than a dozen times,” the Chronicle writes, “and Rosenthal asks Stevens to let him hold her, the messages are not explicit.” An example in the Chronicle article: “The very next time I see you, I want to kiss you behind your right ear.”

Morals aren’t on my beat. Hypocrisy, however, is. When the prosecutor who has made himself and his office responsible for enforcing the morals of consenting adults (Rosenthal is also the prosecutor who, arguing the constitutionality of Texas’s sodomy statute in the Supreme Court, was “outclassed“) is publicly revealed to be no more moral than the rest of us (including those he persecutes), I smell karma in the air. It smells like . . . victory.

(See also: Chuck’s Apology and Le Procureur Soleil de la Republique?)

Practical Blawgosphere Wiki

Don’t forget to check out the Blawg Council Wiki and add to the catalog of blawgs. Someone had the right idea with CrimLaw — he added it to the catalog page for prosecutors’ blawgs and created a page describing it (though, now that I look at it, the creation of a page describing it may have been a happy accident — the PHPWiki software interprets a word with a capital letter within it as a link to a new wiki page).

Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year

Scott Greenfield is taking nominations for Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year:

This will not be a Beauty Pageant for the usual suspects, the big name lawyers in the high-profile cases, but rather the unsung heroes in the trenches, doing the dirty work that flies under the radar.

Please nominate a criminal defense lawyer who has done something to deserve recognition. Please let us know what it is that he or she has done. Do not feel constrained to limit yourself to lawyers who made headlines. The winner will be judged by the worth of his or her efforts in the scheme of our duty to zealously represent those accused of crimes.

It’s about time that we recognize the extraordinary accomplishments of our brethren in the trenches. Now it’s up to you to submit your nomination, via the comments, and acknowledge the exceptional work done every day by men and women who have never made the front page of the newspaper. Let’s do it.

I agree with Scott: it’s about time. I’ll be thinking about narrowing the list of trench lawyers who I know to have done extraordinary work this year, so that I can nominate a few for Scott.

Why Try the Unwinnable?

I closed yesterday’s post on justice and winning by asking, “Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) we try cases because we have nothing to lose: the inevitable result of a trial is no worse than the result of a plea. If we have no hope of winning, why do we try those cases?”

We’re not trying these cases for justice, and we’re not trying them to win (though arguably there’s always a chance that the prosecutor will screw something up and we’ll win, which is something to hope for). Sometimes the goal is just to make it costly and difficult for the government to put the client in a box.

When we try an unwinnable case, not only do we make it harder for the government to box that client, but we also tie up the government’s resources, making it harder for the government to put other humans in boxes.