Long time away

It's been a long time since I've posted a blog. It is going to be a time of change soon. We are moving back to Colorado. I hope to post more soon.

February 6, 2010 :: Defining moments of a criminal defense attorney

These are the moments that define your professional identity.  These are moments which, if you haven't experienced, I say that you're not a full criminal defense attorney yet.

When I worked in Colorado, I had a really good internship with great people, and wonderful teachers of all kinds.  I had a good caseload for someone of my limited experience, and did many, many things.  Of those, a regular task was to make sentencing arguments for people who plead guilty to charges, in an attempt to get leniency from the judge who considered whether to sentence to the maximum of the negotiated jail term, or, hopefully, something less.  After sentenced, I would regularly ask for a stay of execution for a up to a week or two - time before the jail sentence was to be served.  This was often granted.  Sometimes because of the facts of the case, or the client's history, the judge refused.

For a criminal defense attorney, this is an all too familiar scene.  The judge orders the client remanded at the podium, and the deputies approach with handcuffs, and the client is taken away.  I usually tried to get a phone number or someone's name to call to let them know what happened, and why wife, daddy, or daughter isn't coming home for a while.  It's a bad feeling, and a bad call to make, but that sick feeling of despair for someone else is one of these moments I call a defining moment for a criminal defense lawyer.

I just found a new one, which is worse.  Having the conversation focused on, "I'm not going back.  I didn't do anything wrong, and that cop is framing me.  I'm not going back to prison.  I'm doing everything I can to do the right thing, to get my life on track.  I didn't do anything wrong.  I can't go back.  I'll jump off a bridge first."  That conversation is worse when you're looking at a borderline suppression hearing, and a borderline trial at best.

This makes me wonder how many more of these defining moments are out there.

Welcome home to Kentucky!

Colorado MoJo

This new website, Colorado MoJo, is about Colorado's mountains and outdoor sports in Colorado. It looks pretty darned good to me.

Nov 14, 2009 :: lake Vesuvius

My beautiful daughter

Nov 10, 2009 :: Editorial oversight

The attached web article is funny because this is an article about "men's rights," and the photograph for the article is labeled, "photograph of a man." Like, readers might not know that the article is about men, and specifically, what a man looks like. An editor somewhere at doublex.com missed a golden opportunity to ask, "does the image add anything to the article?"

And, Happy Birthday, USMC - Ooh-rah!

Sep 22, 2009 :: Waiting for bar results

I painted some acrylic onto canvases to spruce up the office

A year without a blog entry. Blogging while moving from Colorado to Kentucky is depressing when I would have preferred to stay nearer the mountains.

Since starting criminal defense with the DU criminal representation clinic in January-October of 2008, which helped me into my internship with the Colorado Public Defender's office from January-May of 2009. I wanted to work in public defense, and applied all over the country. Holly was, and remains, supportive of this decision of ours. We moved to Kentucky to work for the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, my present employer. In a little more than two weeks, I will know whether I passed the Kentucky bar exam.

I have found a book on the Red River Gorge. The climbs in that book seem like they will fill the gap I miss about Colorado, elevenmile canyon, clear creek canyon, boulder canyon, and all my old favorite canyons and other climbing areas in the West.

September 12, 2008 :: The working world amuses me

As 3L's, looking for a job, it's disheartening to see such debauchery happening, practically at my doorstep... at least, being unemployed now, I wasn't contributing too many tax dollars to support this federal agency:

From Parties, Sex & Drugs Made Fed’l Office Much Like a Frat House, Probe Finds

Parties, Sex & Drugs Made Fed'l Office Much Like a Frat House, Probe Finds | ABA Journal - Law News Now

A federal government office charged with overseeing the collection of some $4 billion in royalty payments by oil companies to the U.S. government allegedly operated more like an out-of-control fraternity than a regulatory agency.

Sex, booze, drugs and parties among federal employees and representatives of the oil companies they were overseeing contributed to a ''culture of substance abuse and promiscuity'' at the Denver office of the U.S. Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, a $5.3 million investigation found. Meanwhile, there is concern that some 13 current and former employees in Denver and Washington, D.C., may also have been improperly influenced by gifts including sports tickets, golf outings and ski trips, according to the Associated Press and Washington Post.

BUT, compare with the verizon worker who used 45,000 (that's forty-five thousand) minutes of time on the phone AT WORK to make sex calls. I figured that works out to three hours per five day work week, for an entire year without a vacation. All charged to customers accounts, as well. One comment I read was, "how does one spend the equivalent of 3/8 of one's day, or 15 weeks out of 40, making sex calls without someone noticing?" The answer, I suppose, is, "beats me."


From Verizon Worker Charged in 5,000 Illicit Sex Calls

A former Verizon technician racked up $220,000 in calls to sex chat numbers by tapping into the land lines of nearly 950 customers, authorities said Tuesday.

Joseph R. Vaccarelli, 45, of Nutley used customer accounts to make about 5,000 calls to sexually explicit 900 numbers lasting a combined 45,000 minutes, Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said in a news release.

The calls were placed over the last 10 months from residential and commercial accounts in about 30 Bergen County municipalities, authorities and Verizon officials said.

Vaccarelli worked for 10 years as a Verizon facilities technician, installing telephone service and repairing damaged or faulty equipment, said Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman.

Vaccarelli resigned last month after Verizon officials told him he was the target of an internal investigation that began after several customers complained about unauthorized charges, Young said.

Holly and mark at beach

July 22, 2008 :: I'm going back east soon!

Back east... Is that home or is this home?  Home is where one hangs their, er, hat, I suppose, and since my hat collection numbers five now, well, I suppose this sentance couldn't get any longer if I tried, and I'm really, really trying, as you can see, right?

June 17, 2008 :: Comments on moving to Denver

My comments to The House Hunt on metroblogging denver.

My wife and I did the same as you are doing and rented a house entirely through craigslist from D.C. Our story has a happy ending, but it could have gone the other way.

It’s really important to know where you think you’re going to work, as the Denver metropolitan area has the traffic patterns of a city with a much higher population density than it actually has. Mostly on the interstates (I-25, I-225, & I-70) which the inhabitants use as main traffic arterials, and, at the same time, cannot handle merge situations to save their lives. So, every day, between 8am and 10am, then again from 4pm until 6:30pm, many large parts of the interstate system within Denver and Aurora (the other large city stuck the Denver’s East) are parking lots. So, the closer to work you live, the better, especially now with high price of gas.

I needed to live near Denver University, and coming from D.C. where I spent 15-30 minutes commuting 1.5 miles to school, I wanted something closer and easier, so we narrowed our search for rental homes to within a mile from campus. I have a dog, so that narrowed our search as well. We emailed people to give us the address of the house if it wasn’t listed in the ad, and those that would not divulge their address were also filtered. Memorizing the address of the school, Google maps became our best friend. The satillite photos of the house also helped us to ask questions via email about the yard (does it have a fence, a garage, etc).

Some words of wisdom: inside Denver there are good and bad neighborhoods, of course.

- Ask about planned construction projects. Despite the housing situation, many areas like mine in the mile or two around D.U. from Colorado Blvd to Downing St (on the east and west borders) and from Evans St to Alameda (south to north borders) thave houses built in the 1920’s to 1940’s and are being sold for their lots and rebuilt. At least one or two houses per block are in this category, so be sure ask if there are any construction projects planned for next door or accross the street. These houses take from 10-18 months to complete. They are noisy: workers can begin construction at 7am (and they do!) and finish after 6-7pm. If you have no driveway and park on the street, which is common, much of your parking will be monopolized by the workers. Along with construction trailers, construction debris, etc.

- Everyone here waters their lawn - ask about the owner’s desires for a lawn and sprinklers. Our lawn care is included in the rent, we don’t mow the lawn or rake leaves, but we do have to pay the water bill. Last summer, that ran about $80-130 per month, mostly because of watering the lawn every third day with the in-ground, automatic sprinklers. I’m not a fan of green lawns in the desert or arid areas, so I find this wasteful, but at least I don’t mow the lawn on saturdays. Some people even water every day…

- Ask about parking. See above. Also, some places in denver require parking permits, like near DU due to students. Not expensive, but a pain to deal with.

- Houses here don’t often have central air-conditioning, but, if anything, swamp coolers which perform the same task. Mine doesn’t have either, but the owners left us two window units. Since the nights get cool (lately in the low 50’s) this isn’t a problem if you leave windows open at night, then the only warmer time in the house is late afternoon to early evening when the heat has built to its max, before going down again for cooler night temperatures. Good to know, good to ask about. You’ll want easy to open/close windows, not the older kind which "fall closed" or are painted shut - you’ll be using them in the older houses.

- Driver and Vehicle licsensing. If you get Colorado plates and license, these are not through the same agency. Vehicles are registered through the city, and drivers licenses through the state. All can be found through their website. Vehicles older than 8 years or so are cheap the register, but newer ones are not: Denver’s sales tax is 8% and new cars registered in Denver make you wonder why the roads aren’t better than they are :)

- See how close to the interstate it is. As they have so much traffic on them all the time, they have a lot of road noise. Depsite the sound walls, they still are audible background hums at our house a half mile away. We can hear the occassional motorcycle or tractor-trailer gunning their engine before a long shift. Mildly irritating when on a "quiet" 6am walk.

- Lastly, if you can, have anyonen run by a place a take pictures for you and give a general impression of the neighborhood. That’s the best way to check it out from afar. My wife’s father had a friend who drove by ours and didn’t see any obvious "gotcha’s."

Then, after a dozen emails back and forth, I sent the $2000 security deposit check 3/4 of the way accross the country to someone I didn’t really know, hoping they actually owned the property I had an unsigned lease for. Anxious sigh. The plan was to sign it upon arrival and final inspection of the property. I also booked a month at an extended stay hotel ($80 per night, extendable to $1400 for a month) so in the worst case that the house was not theirs, occupied by others, or not even there, we were not homeless and didn’t have to search for such a hotel. We only stayed the night we arrived in denver, and the house worked out the next day. That was last August.

The house next door to us is almost finished 9 months later after it’s construction began, and our sprinkler tech just activated our sprinklers yesterday to rejuvenate the dry, brown lawn in which the house we rent sits. Our dog has a nice yard to play in, and our next door neighbor is very nice and friendly: she a pleasure to talk with It’s 7:40am, and I hear the pleasent chirp of birds outside the window, as my neighborhood is pleasently quiet and for the most part safe.

Our story worked out, but I can see a dozen places where it might not have.

June 10, 2008 :: bored at court

May 31, 2008 :: Gay marriage article with major con law issues

I'm a happily married man, so what do I care about gay marriage? I care about rights. One of my older professors used a story to describe the definition of "new-comer" to a rural commuter county: everyone who moved out here after me is a newcomer. Well, just because I am married doesn't make everyone else a newcomer, less deserving of rights.

This is an interesting case, as per con law in general. The bigger issue here seems to be what happens when a state constitution prohibits gay marriage and is countered by the full faith and credit clause of the US Const where California will start regognizing gay marriage. Even more interesting is that the states seeking to prevent CA from starting their new law are using a separation of powers argument because the governor of NY stated policy to honor the CA marriages. It seems the state legislatures beleive it's their jobs to interpret their constitution and set policy, not the governor.

In prior articles, the press reported that full faith and credit usually applies to judicial acts with a far higher level of "oomph" (respect) than statutes, and I'm thinking that a marriage certificate, issued by a court would be such a higher-respected judicial act.

Even more interesting is that Colorado (of Romer v. Evans, loosely: the US sup ct case denying CO the "gay rights ban" to the people of CO's state constitution) is one of the states, but not virginia (where an anti-gay-marriage statute was actually passed in 2004).

10 States Seek Calif. Gay Marriage Delay; Suit to Be Filed in N.Y. | ABA Journal - Law News Now

Updated: Opposing forces are gearing up to fight a major battle over the right of same-sex couples to marry, centered on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court that the state constitution protects their right to do so.

Following a directive by New York's Democratic governor, David Paterson, that New York will recognize as legal any such marriage that is legal in the state in which it is held, a Christian legal group has announced that it will sue over the policy, reports the Associated Press.

"The group, the Alliance Defense Fund based in Arizona, is working with New York legislators on the case that in part will accuse Paterson of violating the separation of powers in his directive this week," the news agency writes.

Joseph Bruno, the New York senate's Republican majority leader, has been considering a possible challenge to the governor's directive, the New York Times previously reported.

Meanwhile, the attorneys general of 10 other states petitioned the California Supreme Court yesterday, seeking to delay the implementation of the gay marriage ruling until after this fall's elections. That is so they can see whether voters approve state constitutional amendments to require that marriages be between a man and a woman before deciding how to respond to the California situation, reports the Associated Press in another article.

California's attorney general is urging the court not to grant the delay.

State officials plan to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses on June 17, and have already unveiled a new form that substitutes "Party A" and "Party B" for traditional bride and groom designations, as discussed in another New York Times article.

The 10 states seeking delay are: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah.

May 31, 2008 :: Second year...Done

This is a short post. Second year of law school is finished. Leaving me 2/3 of the way through my J.D.

How exciting :)

March 28, 2008 :: Virginia Politics "mistakes were made" -Abusive-driver fees repealed -- Heads of State, Virginia, Timothy M. Kaine -- dailypress.com

The classic, "mistakes were made" political quote. I love it.

Abusive-driver fees repealed -- Heads of State, Virginia, Timothy M. Kaine -- dailypress.com: "The Virginia-only provision sparked widespread grass-roots anger. As accident and arrest data poured in, state leaders learned to their chagrin that the threat of fees as high as $3,000 didn't improve general driving behavior.

'In the earnestness of trying to solve the transportation issue, a mistake was made,' said Sen. Edward Houck, D-Spotsylvania, who sponsored Senate Bill 1 in the 2008 session to repeal the fees. 'This was simply the wrong way to go about funding transportation. And today is the day we correct all that.'"

March 26, 2008 :: Chewbacca's Purse

I've been looking at The Satchel Pages website and found myself reading about man-bandoliers for utility. Someone wrote about Star Wars' Chewbacca's utility belt, and I laughed out loud. That deserves a blog entry.

It seems that messenger bags are also "men purses," "bailout bags," and "murses," to name a few alternate terms for a bag a man carries things in. I've been looking for a decent bad to carry to court and think I might have found one for a reasonable price.

Soon, I'll be searching for a reasonably priced diaper bag. I'm narrowing on a canvas/leather bag, or a small timbuk2 messenger. Baby steps...pun.

Threads.Rebelscum.com: Chewbacca's Purse: "What the hell is that thing Chewbacca wears? What does he carry in it? A bigass hairbrush and nail file?

It sure as hell ain't no utility belt or he would have used it to escape from the net trap on Endor. It can't be an ammo belt, or it would have looked pretty damned suspicious for a couple of stormtroopers to be parading an 8-foot wookiee through the Death Star with a sling of ammunition draped over his shoulder. And I know it's not suspenders, 'cause he's got no pants.

Any ideas? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of the Classic Trilogy. Help me out."

March 16, 2008 :: Bella in a vail snowstorm

Vail snowstorm

Mar 11, 2008 :: Great weather

Sixty degrees! Supposed to snow later this week, though.