The Felon

Yesterday, a man with residences in New York, Florida and other places, was convicted of 34 felonies in New York State, subject to appeal later.  He apparently will be the first President inaugurated in this country as a convicted felon.

I’ll leave to Joyce Vance and the man’s niece to comment.  Joyce’s commentary is here; Mary’s here.

Personally, I feel Judge Merchan dealt with an impossible situation in the most appropriate way possible.  The debate will be incessant.  The convictions, of course, are only the tiny tip of the iceberg of the legal residue of his time.  There will be plenty of time to remember those.  The fog will lift….

I am a fan of the Rule of Law.  I’m not a lawyer, but much of my work was, as I often describe, “with, around and against lawyers”.  Without differences of opinion about what laws mean, there would be no need for lawyers.  Without lawyers, arguably, there would be no laws.  The matter of living in community is difficult even in the smallest context – the family.  The larger the circle, the greater the potential for problems relating to justice.

The man convicted yesterday was not a victim; rather he was a recipient of the consequences of his own deeds.  No question, he has some unlikely magnetic pull: 77 million of our fellow citizens voted for him and his pick for vice-president; only 75 million for my preferred candidates, Harris/Walz.  Don’t forget that four years earlier, 81 million had voted for Biden/Harris, to 74 million for him/Pence.  Don’t ever forget the very real and very positive legacy Biden/Harris leave behind as accomplishments the last four years.

Remember as we go forward, there are 1.3 million practicing lawyers in the United States; and over 30,000 Federal and state judges.  Judge Merchan, yesterday, said that during the trial there were 33 other trials in various stages in the same courts building.  Behind the spotlight are infinite numbers of very good  lawyers and judges (one of who is Merchan).  You probably know some lawyer, or maybe even some judge, in person.  They are people too.

In a nation of nearing 340,000,000 people with a near 240 year history, the potential for differences of opinion are infinite.

I have frequently made reference to a booklet published in 1959 by the American Bar Association for Law Day.  I offer it again, here, for your education.  It is in four parts only because my scanner was not behaving itself at the time.  It totals 50 pages.

(1) Law Day Am Bar Assoc 1959 (cover to 17); (2) Law Day (2) Am Bar Assoc 1959(18-24); (3) Law Day (3) Am Bar Assoc 1959 (25-43); (4) Law Day (4) Am Bar Assoc 1959 (44-52).  My favorite is “Law in a Treehouse World” found on page 49.

POSTNOTE:

As noted above, my career was “with, around and against lawyers”, dealing with issues related to employee relations and negotiated contracts.  What I learned, I largely learned on the job.  One of the abiding insights was an awareness that the only criteria about the ruling of a judge or an arbitrator or similar was “does the ruling make sense?”  Anytime I heard a lawyer utter the word “clearly”, I was pretty sure things were not all that “clear”.  On and on.  The word “evidence” early on came to have meaning; it was much more than a complaint.  It is easy to get irritated with rulings and procedures and appeals, but all of these are well grounded in Law and legal tradition.  And there are mistakes made.  The members of the fraternity of the law are the ones who have the interesting conversations, I’m certain.

In my memory, my most coveted award was something the Oppenheimer law firm legal eagles called the “Greek Grappler Award”, which they granted for a few years to a most deserving (said with tongue firmly in cheek) recipient.

One year it was me, and it was a few pages of a legal transcript from a hearing in Federal Court in St. Paul that earned the “accolades”.  I don’t recall the exact year, but probably somewhere around 1980.  The right-to-work people were attempting to skewer part of Minnesota’s bargaining statute, and I was one of those subpoenaed to produce every piece of paper and other record in my possession for examination in Federal Court.

I was not practiced at archiving memos, etc., but in the end I had a pretty good collection, I think, thanks to a couple of great secretaries.

That was the easy part.

My qualification for the “Greek Grappler” was the time of my testimony, in which I was doing my best to be truthful, but apparently flummoxed the Big City Lawyer attempting to skewer me.  His mistake was thinking that I actually knew something that I really didn’t.  I was working day to day, doing the best I could.

In the end, the case ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court and the Union prevailed and the ruling stayed basically intact for about 40 years.  I’d like to think it was me who made the difference, but the Greek Grappler award brings me down to human level….

The Law is a search for truth, and even those who thing they’ve got a winning strategy to escape and evade it are not always correct.