Introduction
[I am] a million miles from a million dollars, but you could never spend [my] wealth.
Nicholas Katsantzakis, the author of such powerful works as “Zorba the Greek” and the”Last Temptation of Christ” did not write a word until he was 65. He believed that one must thoroughly live before one is ready to write. I am in the !st month of my 65th year on this planet.
Upon my graduation from Georgetown Law School, having scored touchdowns for the University of South Carolina, the University made an offer to me that I did not deserve- a position as an Assistant Professor in their young College of Criminal Justice. I took it and the University, instead of the legally trained ex-wide receiver that they expected, they had hired a Jesuit educated revolutionary.
I loved teaching, being at my essence a schoolteacher. Consistent with my academic obligations, I published my first work, an article on the mythopoeic drama of society’s movement from one heroic paradigm to another, specifically the American death penalty But I was a fraud. I was not worthy to teach or write for I had not yet done.
The phenomenologist philosopher Heidegger aptly teaches as the adversarial system demands that one must always be vigilant in evaluating what someone purports to know with their interest. Simply stated, every witness must be cross examined on their biases, and motives. Therefore, I must confess mine.
Shortly after I began teaching, the great god chance, taking the form of a student’s father, a former US Attorney for SC asked me to help him to represent James Terry Roach. Terry, a 17 year old under the domination of a 24 year old at the time of a double murder, was 1 of 2 co-defendants charged in the1st Post-Furman Capital prosecution, He was, therefore, a guest on SC’s death row at CCI in Columbia within a mile of my office. He had just had his conviction and sentence affirmed by the South Carolina Supreme Court and was on the threshold of his first petition for certiorari to the US Supreme Court to be followed by state and federal habeas collateral attacks on his conviction and sentence. He, also, was borderline retarded and likely suffered from the brain deteriorating disease Huntingdon”s Chorea. The abolitionist hope of Furman was short lived. America was again in the business of teaching it is wrong to kill by killing.
For 8 years, I unsuccessfully fought to persuade the US Supreme Court, and the lower state and federal courts that the 8th Amendment barred the death penalty against juveniles at the time of the crime, especially one who was retarded and likely suffering from a brain disease. SC executed my Terry Roach on January 10, 1986. For the next 31 years , I struggled to defend America, one person at a time — many times one unpopular person, considered beyond forgiveness in the minds of prosecutors. From there to here!
When I speak, a person, accused or arrested, will always be beside me. Such is my bias and motive. Evaluate all I say considering that my motive is to serve the primacy of the person, my client, embroiled in a struggle for justice with mercy, even if their interest conflicts with my country’s express patriotic interests.
Moreover, there is more to consider, I have now been defrocked. I viewed my work in a humble way as a vocation devoted to an American Theology. After 39 years of practicing law as a trial lawyer representing the accused and injured, I have been disbarred as a result of being indicted and now convicted of Money laundering and Tampering. Federal crimes arising out of my criminal representation with other lawyers in a joint defense of a pot distribution organization. Consideration of all I say must be tempered by mindfulness of this bias. Cross-examine all I say accordingly.
The purpose of this series of essays is to discuss:
The authentic American theology of the human rights of persons which should have a moral purpose in the world.
The dangers and opportunities dually presented by the present crisis of human justice in America.
And finally, an insurgent jurisprudence, a plan for action, to be considered by America’s marketplace of ideas and, more specifically, by America’s criminal defense clergy in service to this, hopefully universal, human rights theology.
97 percent of America’s criminal defendants plead guilty. The American criminal trial is dead, depriving American juries, the consciences of our communities, from participating in the decisions whose consequences their communities bear. The American experiment stands for the proposition that in the Lockean state of nature, when all our equal, disputes between equals and the defendable truth, can only be resolved by an adversarial process animated by the leadership of the community, juries.
The persons chosen to be prosecuted, what are considered their crimes and what should be their punishments, particularly federally, are no longer the product of the rule of law but the rule of official discretion — initially by law enforcement in the privacy of police cars and later by prosecutors whose decision making is secret and, in large part, hidden behind closed doors. “More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way.” As my Irish mother frequently reminded me, hell is paved with good intentions. Inescapably, unchecked power corrupts.
These essays are not intended to simply cry out in complaint, but, humbly are intended to sound a clarion call to not only my now spiritual colleagues, America’s criminal defense clergy, but also to the American marketplace of ideas, generally, to organize and demand that American justice be true to an authentic person-centered American theology of universal human rights.
