UNDERDOG - JON KATZ, MARYLAND & VIRGINIA Criminal Defense Lawyer

When someone says "I want to get it over with," is the person doing nothing but merely chasing after an illusion?

Let us consider the ultimate effort to get it over with: suicide. My spiritual guru and friend Jun Yasuda told me that one day a man walked up to her teacher, the late Nichidatsu Fujii Guruji, and proclaimed that he was going to kill himself. Perhaps against the advice of those at suicide helplines, Fujii Guruji laughed, and said something along the lines of: "You think it is that easy to get away from your problems?" Of course, Fujii Guruji and Jun-san believe in reincarnation. I did not learn whether this man ultimately decided not to kill himself; because of their belief in reincarnation, I do not know how much that question mattered to Jun-san and Fujii Guruji.

Whatever the inclination might be for people to confess their suicidal plans to Nipponzan Myohoji clergy, on a separate occasion, a man approached Jun-san, telling her his plan to kill himself. Her verbal reaction was along the lines of: "Great. If you are going to kill yourself, you will no longer need food, so you might as well fast." He did fast, and he returned to Jun-san telling her that during his fast he decided not to kill himself after all.

We are so cluttered up with excess junk, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. When a person fasts -- and the fast can be enhanced by a vacation from the Internet; phone; all other technology driven by electricity, batteries, and petroleum; and newspapers -- s/he has no choice but to slow down due to the reduced physical energy caused by the fast. With such slowing down comes the opportunity to empty the excess mind junk and spiritual junk. Competing with the benefit of slowing down is the tug-of-war often presented to -- but avoidable by -- trial lawyers with the constant demands to drive to all sorts of court appearances (and then often to wait and wait in court); to visit clients in jail and to meet with them in the office and offsite; to meet merciless court filing deadlines for motions, opposing motions, and appellate briefs; and to investigate and prepare for clients' cases, while still meeting the demands of the lawyer's personal life. The trial lawyer's time and personal challenges are well capture by my late friend John Johnson in his poem "A Meeting with Mother Earth," including this line: "The life of lawyering is filled with noise and turmoil. Peace is hard to find - even in seeking after justice. Modern mankind runs amok in anxious pursuit of an elusive technological happiness..."

No matter how much stagefright a lawyer might have about a case -- and it is critical for lawyers to adjust their lives and relationships with the world and themselves to diminish those fears -- a criminal defense lawyer's client is likely to be more fearful than that. The more the lawyer earns the client's trust, confidence, and comfort, the more the lawyer will help not only to reduce the client's fears, but to help the client make decisions from a position of strength, patience, and full willingness to share all ideas, concerns, questions and fears with the lawyer. For a lawyer to reach such a quantum level with his or her client, nothing substitutes for spending quality time with the client, with the lawyer listening empathetically, actively, respectfully, and deeply, and responding empathetically and with the best and directly gentle of bedside manners while seeing the client as the lawyer's equal. Investing such time and energy is a commodity that too many lawyers fear investing, lest they have insufficient time left to do their other work and to earn a living. However, nobody ever said that being a criminal defense lawyer is an easy ticket to financial stability. Moreover, the lawyer who puts clients ahead of money will earn more money or other good fortune in the end than the lawyer who does the opposite.

Greenland dog image available for publc use here. 

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Ken Lammers and Scott Greenfield recently commented on the dropping of Underdog from my blog's title line.

I selected the Underdog moniker for this blog's 2006 maiden voyage, to capture the essence not only of me, my clients, and my criminal and Constitutional defense work, but also the immigration law work of my then-law partner Jay Marks. The moniker -- originally inspired by my hero and amazing teacher Steve Rench -- still fits, so I have returned the Underdog title to its rightful place on this blog's masthead.  

As to the title of this blog entry, thanks for the Talking Heads' inspiration for it. Jon Katz. 

Image from public domain.

Marijuana is great medicine. It is natural and green, and lacks the very undesirable side effects of so many other medicines, including anti-depressants. It can be ingested in brownies and cookies, to avoid being smoked. Pharmaceutical companies have no financial interest in having marijuana legalized, because if it becomes legal, people can grow their own quality marijuana weed.

Here are some good links I recently found by medical professionals that detail the medicinal benefits of marijuana:

- Taped interview with Donald Abrams, M.D., on medical marijuana.

"Short Term Effects of Cannabinoids in HIV Infection." This title relates to a study that is outlined here at the website for the Multidiscipliary Association for Psychedelic Studies. More details on the study are here.

"Cannabis in painful HIV-associated sensory neuropathy." This is an abstract. The full text is available by subscription here.

Marijuana, the AIDS Wasting Syndrome, and the U.S. Government: Letter to the editor for New England Journal of Medicine.

"Medical marijuana and the Supreme Court."

Here is a link to an article suggesting possible dangers from marijuana, but advocating further study.

- "Adverse effects of medical cannabinoids: a systematic review." The report says, in part:

"Short-term use of existing medical cannabinoids appeared to increase the risk of nonserious adverse events. The risks associated with long-term use were poorly characterized in published clinical trials and observational studies. High-quality trials of long-term exposure are required to further characterize safety issues related to the use of medical cannabinoids."

 Jon Katz. 

Imagine not just reading our Underdog blog, but working at Underdog's central headquarters. I humbly ask Underdog's readers to send the finest candidates our way to fill an additional part-time legal assistant position. Full details about the position are here.

Our office is less than a mile from our nation's capital. It does not get any better than this for those seeking such work. Thanks for those who spread the word of this job opening at our law firm. Jon Katz. 

Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.).

Too many monolingual people seem to think that if they speak louder or repetitively that ultimately they will be understood by a person who does not speak the speaker's language. Too many people think that if a person understands such phrases as "Do you speak English" or "Fire, fire" that this means the person speaks the tens of thousands of other words and phrases needed to have a sufficient command of the English language.

Nothing beats struggling with learning a second language to understand how hard it is for others to learn English, including figuring out how to conjugate verbs in the past, present and future tenses, struggling to understand native speakers who talk a mile a minute, and memorizing and pronouncing a jumble of strange-sounding words. It seems that the vast majority of Americans stop studying another language once such study is no longer required for obtaining a degree or for strengthening a college application; yet plenty of the same people want to surmise that it is easy for others to learn English as a second language.

When I have a non-English speaking client, I ordinarily arrange for a witness to come to court to testify about my client's limited English, in order to challenge any assertion by the prosecutor that my client understood the English being spoken to him or her. Recently, I won a license suspension hearing related to a drunk driving charge, on the basis that Maryland's convoluted and lengthy advice of rights form for taking the breathalyzer test was either not translated at all into Spanish, or that a Spanglish speaker struggled to tell my client the words on the advice of rights form. See below for further details on that hearing.

In my experience, cops use a hit-or-miss approach to try to communicate with people who speak little to no English. Some police forces have some fully fluent people available to help, but then I argue that the absence of such interpreters' court testimony makes the interpretation inadmissible hearsay evidence. Some judges let prosecutors get away with asking cops "Did he appear to understand you" and "Did he tell you he did not understand you or needed help interpreting your English?" Where I practice law, a huge percentage of native Spanish speakers come from countries where the cops constantly and often brutally trample on people's rights, and do not serve the interests of ordinary people. (Hmm, that also describes too many cops in the United States.) Silence from people coming from such countries does not necessarily mean the English is understood, but instead can be a self-preservation technique.

Being human, judges need to be educated about the nuances falling between the scale of a person who speaks fifty to five hundred English words in order to achieve basic survival on the one hand, and a person who arrives in the United States below the age of ten and soaks up English like a sponge. A huge percentage of people fall within the first half of that range of English-speaking ability. Moreover, most people are better able to speak a second language in an understandable fashion than to understand what is being said to them. People speak the words they understand, but the listener does not necessarily know all the words s/he hears in a second language.

With that backdrop, here is an outline of questions I asked my client on the road to victory in my recent license suspension hearing related to a drunk driving arrest:

- Where were you born?

- At work, what language does your boss speak?

(Here the answer was that the boss speaks English. Instead of saying "Oh, sh_t" to myself, I followed up with: "How are you able to understand your boss's English at work?" Answer: "A co-worker interprets for me.")

My t'ai chi teacher Len Kennedy once said: "When you are fatigued, do t'ai chi." On another occasion, I learned the following from Len: Internally, during one of "those meetings," the t'ai chi practitioner does t'ai chi, through relaxing and sinking into one's chair or into the ground if standing; by relaxing actively through being fully aware of what is happening around the t'ai chi practitioner without getting sucked into nonsense; and by emptying the mind and body of stress and wasted energy in order to deal with the matter at hand.

Len Kennedy learned t'ai chi from Robert W. Smith, who was t'ai chi megamaster Cheng Man Ch'ing's first Western student. Recently, I found this response to nihilism from Professor Cheng, as recounted by Fred Lehrman:

"I remember sitting one morning several years ago with Professor Cheng and several students in the Asian Library at Columbia University. The Club of Rome Report had just been released by MIT, and one of the students had bought in a clipping from the New York Times outlining the hopelessness of solving the compounded problems posed by overpopulation, food shortage, energy resource depletion, atmospheric pollution, radioactive waste, etc. The student was quite upset, and asked professor Cheng what he thought of the situation, and how we could get out of it. The Taiji master turned the question around and asked the questioner what his ideas were. The student gave his answer, and sat expectantly, awaiting correction from the Sage. Instead, Professor Cheng turned to another student at the table, and asked, 'What do you think about what he said?' This continued until each student had commented on the others ideas, and it was clear that the subject had been exhausted. There was really no way to solve the problem. Professor Cheng went back to reading his book.

"After a pause, the first student, more upset than ever, asked again for some word from the teacher. Professor Cheng leaned forward, and put his book down next to the cup of hot tea which had just been refilled for him. 'What will happen to the world? I don’t know. Look at this vapor; it comes from the tea, it goes into the air, and right about here' – he pointed in the air – 'you don’t see it anymore. Where does it go?' He sat quietly for a moment while we pondered the empty space left after the world had destroyed itself. 'Don’t worry about it,' he said, 'Nothing gets lost.'"

Read the rest of Fred Lehrman's powerful essay here.

Such lessons from Cheng Man Ch'ing keep me inspired to practice t'ai chi, doing the form morning and night without fail, and applying the t'ai chi principles to everything I do. Tea anyone? Jon Katz. 

 Image from public domain.

A wonderful fringe benefit of my marijuana defense work has involved meeting key players who bring sense to overcome so much of the nonsense of anti-marijuana crusaders. In addition to meeting such players through NORML annual meetings, I have worked with marijuana smell expert Richard Doty, and marijuana grow experts Chris Conrad and Jon Gettman. I have met medical marijuana M.D. Lester Grinspoon by phone, which was a real trip, as his was one of the first names I learned of in the ongoing movement to legalize marijuana. It has also been an honor to know NORML founder Keith Stroup and the late Don Fiedler, who was both a great criminal defense lawyer and past NORML national director.

Teaming with marijuana cultivation experts Chris Conrad and Jon Gettman, I won a Maryland medical marijuana sentence of just a fine followed by a probation before judgment (which means my client has no conviction in the case) on a prosecution for over thirty marijuana plants.

In addition to being a marijuana grow expert, Jon Gettman is a former NORML national director. Jon and I spoke recently, and he graciously permitted me to upload his 2002 article with Virginia caselaw to beat intent to distribute prosecutions in favor of simple possession convictions, which carry drastically lower sentencing exposure. Jon. who lives in Lovettsville, Virginia, also provided me his updated resume. Check out his webpage entitled DrugScience.org.

Thanks, Jon, Chris, Keith, Don, Lester, Richard, and the rest of you who have poured your heart and souls into replacing myth with facts about marijuana. Jon Katz.