Jon's news & views

By Fairfax County/Northern Virginia/Maryland/Beltway criminal defense lawyer Jon Katz. Defending DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving, drugs, marijuana/medical marijuana/cultivation, sex cases, felonies and misdemeanors. Fighting relentlessly for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

We cannot only look within and to ourselves for inspiration to succeed in life, because life is too short, we are all connected, and we do not need to reinvent the wheel. On the flip side, the answers to most of our most pressing questions and challenges are found first right within ourselves, with the benefit of the lessons we have already learned from ourselves, from others, and from our experiences. With that backdrop, I take the time on my website from time to time to bow to and thank those who have particularly befriended, encouraged and inspired me on life's path.

Today I deeply thank and bow to my friends and lawyers Dax Cowart and Bob Hilliard.

I met Dax and Bubba Bob (he calls his sons bubba and me bubba, not from any low-rent approach) in August 1995 at the Trial Lawyers College ("TLC"), where I spent the entire month on a beautiful Western Wyoming ranch, ten miles from the nearest paved road, devoting that huge part of my life to becoming a better lawyer and person.

I was a public defender lawyer at the time, which was not as big a financial and time burden to be at the TLC as if I had been my own boss as a solo or small firm practitioner. Bob was already a great and achieved lawyer with his own small personal injury law firm in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Dax had already experienced tremendous ups and downs in his life, then just a few years from trying his first case before a jury. Dax had already experienced a huge physical trial twenty-two years earlier, when he was severely burnt in a propane gas explosion, which his father did not survive.

BOB HILLIARD

Bob was my roommate for those four weeks at TLC, for no reason at first other than that we were back to back on the alphabet of the fifty attendees. He knew I was yearning to return to private law practice and ultimately to become my own boss. He heard my financial concerns about being my own boss, with no salaried and benefited safety net beneath me, but with huge heights at the ready to soar higher than I had ever soared. Bob shared with me how he became his own boss and never looked back.

Before attending the TLC, I was not quite sure what to make of plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers. I got the sense that so many of them saw their clients as mere dollar signs, but of course putting clients ahead of money earns a lawyer more money than putting money ahead of clients. Bob and many other personal injury lawyers at the TLC made clear how much they put their clients ahead of money, often at huge personal financial sacrifice and risk.

Bob had more faith at the time in my ability to make it as my own boss and to soar at it than I did. He saw greatness in me that I had not yet discovered, and knew that it would come out the more that I developed more confidence. (That confidence particularly came full speed ahead once I took the plunge to being my own boss.) He saw the compassion and caring I have for people, and my passion for justice. One year later, I left the public defender's office to join a trial lawyer firm. Two years after that I, I finally became my own boss. That was fifteen years ago, and I have never looked back.

After the TLC ended, I was in touch with Bob on and off. He has been like Charlotte in Charlotte's web (except for the gender difference and that he has survived many years more on this earth), who taught me the lessons I needed to know, and left me to move forward without needing to be in touch with him further. One day around two years later when I emailed Bob about a personal issue I was having with another lawyer at my last firm where I was an employee, Bob sent a brief reply saying essentially: "I trust you to work out this problem the right way, and you can trust yourself to do the same thing" He was right. He was just reminding me to look within myself first when facing a challenge.

When it comes to disharmony at home, Bob suggested remembering what made me fall in love with my wife in the first place. He is the real McCoy, and I will forever be grateful to Bob.

DAX COWART

Over two decades before I met Dax, he and his father returned to their car where, unbeknownst to them, an odorless propane gas leak had sprung from a rusting underground pipe. When they tried to get their car to start, after it first would not, the spark from the car created a ball of fire that killed Dax's father and left Dax so badly burnt and in such excruciating pain that he asked the first person who found him for a gun, to shoot himself out of his misery. The man declined, Dax's mother blocked his efforts to stop medical treatment, and Dax started his long road to recovery, blinded forever in both eyes, and with most of his fingers gone.

Subsequently, Dax went to law school. By the time I arrived at the TLC, his experience was apparently a subject of study in the right to die movement, which Dax very much supports. Dax told me that his desire to die rather than face the excruciating pain after the fire did not mean that he did not want to be alive now that he does not have that depth and severity of physical pain any longer.

All of us have our handicaps, whether physical, mental or both. People who transcend their handicaps inspire me. Dax's handicaps just happened to be physical.

Nobody at the TLC walked around in business suits nor body armor. In fact, anyone who hid their real selves and their real feelings at the TLC would not get a great reception from most of the others there. We gathered around a campfire several nights a week, with a lot of people singing (which seemed to overdo it too often, making for less conversation and joking with those who were singing); spent time in small and large groups from post-breakfast to pre-dinner developig ourselves as better people and better lawyers (becoming a better lawyer requires becoming a better person at the same time); and spending free time together (with me spending some of that free time running several miles almost daily, overcoming the thinner mountain atmosphere day by day).

One song that I did not get tired of was Dax's rendition of Bad News, which Johnny Cash used to sing. I like Dax's interpretation even more than this Cash version. Dax completely floored me in his cross examination during a mock trial. He stood there with his stick cane and entire persona filling the entire room, and took total control of that barn-turned-courtroom, to his persuasive best.

I have had numerous discussions with Dax, revealing our true selves. Leaving the TLC, it was all the harder to make any effort at making cocktail party conversation anywhere, even at cocktail parties; I had reached the deep point of no return. Depth is where it is at.

Whether or not their both being native Texans has anything to do with it, Bob and Dax are both very passionate people who transcend courtroom attire even when wearing it. Here they are on 20/20 in 1999 for a story about Dax. Here is Bob in 2011 discussing a lawsuit he filed over the shooting death by U.S. border patrol agent(s) of a young man on the Mexican side of the border who allegedly was throwing stones. Are you able to watch these videos without being deeply moved?

By Fairfax County/Northern Virginia/Maryland/Beltway criminal defense lawyer Jon Katz. Defending DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving, drugs, marijuana/medical marijuana/cultivation, sex cases, felonies and misdemeanors. Fighting relentlessly for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

"You should write a book,"  recommends my wife. She anticipates an interest in the reading public to read about the experiences and ideas of a criminal defense lawyer  (myself) who does his best to apply mindfulness to my life and work.

A great civil trial lawyer who I know from the Trial Lawyers College echoes my wife's recommendation, and says he will read my book (assuring me of at least two readers). This unassuming-seeming man constantly persuades juries to his side through the strength of his realness without any flashiness, deep caring for his clients, and uncompromising preparation and battle planning, and spirit. He writes screenplays for fun, none of them sold yet, possibly because he does not have the time to market than write them.

How would I find time to write a book? Some of the great writers of literature pour their hearts and souls over hundreds of hours and sometimes over years to write just one, well-edited and tightly-written book that has a huge impact for decades and sometimes centuries to come. Plenty of non-fiction books obviously are pieced together from the author's prior speeches and writings, often with little to no quality editing. Then, we have the books running in between the foregoing approaches to writing books. Watch out what lurks behind enticing book covers.

We are overrun with so many books that all the more gem books will be missed in the process of finding needles in the haystack and gold in the mud. The same could be said of so many things in life.Even such a gem as the children's The Monster Who Ate My Peas was not on the shelves of one of the area's best children's bookstores. When I asked the owner the reason, she said that she does not restock books that do not sell at least one copy in a year.

In this day of self-published books that can be advertised and sold online all over the place, perhaps John Kennedy Toole's suicide would not have been influenced -- or happened at all -- for his inability to get his masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces published.  A Confederacy of Dunces is about Ignatius Reilly, a brilliant but obnoxious hero -- with a dimwitted but caring and overly-tolerant mother -- who sucks jelly out of donuts and returns them to the box for others to eat, takes a filing job only to throw out papers to be filed, takes a hot dog stand job only to eat up the profits, and takes a library job only to spend an entire day gluing just one pocket for return cards into one book. He proclaims that he was born in the wrong century, and that medieval times would have suited him better. Confederacy's author Toole became so tormented that he killed himself, apparently because he could not find a publisher for the book, with his mother finally finding a publisher, and with the book earning a Pulitzer prize.

Self publishing online and in books has removed publishers and periodicals as the gatekeepers of what the mass population gets instant access to read. Those publishers nevertheless still wield much influence on what people read, because their choices typically are the only population from which booksellers and periodical sellers choose what they sell. Whether published through established publishing houses, smaller publishing organizations or self-publishing, books run from drek to having their moments to good to extraordinary.

If I write a book, I likely will reach a wider audience for my ideas than I already reach. My blog already provides me plenty of ideas for the book, which likely will focus on exhilarating and stormy points in my life, finding and following taijiquan and mindfulness practice out of necessity, living my personal and professional life through engagement and while striving for non-duality/non-attachment, focusing on defending clients and living life to the hilt, and finding calmness in the eye of the storm.

None of us live in a vacuum nor long enough to only credit ourselves for our accomplishments, so my book will also talk about some of the great people from who I have learned, and who have encouraged me on the path of life. These include my wife and son, Jun Yasuda, Steve Rench,  Trudy Morse, SunWolf, and my taijiquan teachers Ellen and Len Kennedy, Julian Chu, David Walls-Kaufman, Ben Lo (for brief in-person periods) and Chang Man Ch'ing (who passed away before I ever heard of him). I have also been greatly influenced by Ram Dass, Wayne Dyer, Ihaleakala Hew Len, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and Allan Watts.

If you have any other ideas for my first book, please send them my way.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com.

June 3, 2013: On June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese army turned its guns on its own people, who were peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Such atrocities are not limited to China. Look no farther than Kent State nineteen years earlier, even if on a smaller scale and not ordered from the highest echelons of power. Look, as well, at Syria's military's shooting and targeting not only armed rebels, but also unarmed, non-violent activists, and the same happening in Egypt during the uprising against Mubarak's government.

Human rights violations worldwide -- including in the United States -- also take the form of threats of arrests, arrests and convictions for what should be lawful activity; government intimidation in many forms; and laws and court orders that contravene the most basic of human freedoms.

Following is an adaptation from my April 23, 2007, account of this horrific tragedy:

Tiananmen Square massacre. Best viewed on an empty stomach.

On June 3, 1989, I was about to go to sleep before going to my younger brother's high school graduation the next morning. The television news reported on the Tiananmen Square massacre that had taken place. The news reports were just coming in, and apparently in the process of being clarified and detailed. Having no Internet for getting more information, I went to bed with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The next morning I watched the news to learn how massive, extreme and brutal had been the massacre. I felt even sicker.

I saw Norman Mailer at the graduation -- one of the older parents there -- and thanked him for sharing his writings with the world. I could have talked to him about the massacre, but felt relief enough that he was there, and surmised he felt the same as I over the massacre.

I returned to Washington, DC, where I was preparing for the bar exam. After lunch with two law school friends, we passed by the Chinese embassy, where I saw a lone demonstrator standing before the lady liberty statue that had been standing in a park near the embassy. I asked the driving friend to let me off there, because I decided to join the lone protestor. They advised caution about getting into trouble. What trouble was I supposed to fear, demonstrating peacefully so shortly after the massacre?

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

Today's blog entry is adapted from last year's on the same topic.

Today is Memorial Day, which is a holiday for memorializing America's war dead. However, the bigger focus of the holiday seems to be long weekend vacations, picnics, pool openings, parades, and retail sales.

I have said plenty about the military. Mainly, I believe the United States needs an effective military. However, I also believe that the military-industrial-government complex is dangerously overgrown; that the United States has been too trigger-happy with the military and that effective diplomacy needs to be given more opportunity; and that violence begets violence, and, even though I am not a full pacifist, that Gandhi and many other pacifists' messages are important to take to heart and are often very powerful and effective. I also believe that the United States military has been the source of too many severe abuses, atrocities, and imperialist expansion whether originating from the lower ranks, the highest echelons, or somewhere in between; and that the United States government repeatedly has used war -- and by now terrorism, as well -- as an excuse to stymie civil liberties.

Using effective diplomacy and hemming in military excess is not impossible. Although I take it that America's military, military budget, and nuclear arsenal continued growing under his watch, Jimmy Carter "was thankful that although my profession was that of a military man - commander in chief of the armed forces, prepared to defend my nation with maximum force if I had to - I was able to go through my entire term in office without firing a bullet, dropping a bomb or launching a missile." (Esquire, January 2005). (Many Americans at the time preferred the cowboy mentality of Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in an Electoral College landslide. Carter's full quote is: "The hostage crisis lasted almost a year. Most of my political advisers were urging me to launch an attack against Iran. I could have, in effect, destroyed Iran with one strike. And it would have been politically popular to do so. But in the process, I would have also killed thousands of innocent Iranians. And it would have undoubtedly resulted in the execution of our hostages... My family tied me back to the human element in the most important international, diplomatic and military decisions I had to make. And in the end, I was thankful that although my profession was that of a military man - commander in chief of the armed forces, prepared to defend my nation with maximum force if I had to - I was able to go through my entire term in office without firing a bullet, dropping a bomb or launching a missile.").

In short, Memorial Day should not be a day blindly to glorify the military, military service, or soldiers. Instead, it should be a time to humanize soldiers from all sides and the civilians they have harmed and to recognize the sacrifices they have made while maintaining a realistic and critical assessment of American militarism; recognizing the serious tradeoffs involved in using and threatening military force; and recognizing that soldiers are humans including those who will commit horrid atrocities and others who will try to stop the atrocities.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

The D.C. Contemplative Law Group -- whose meetings I have coordinated for nearly a year -- has a new and improved meeting place, at the Insight Meditation Community's Washington, D.C., location listed below. We previously met in our own reserved room at a restaurant that subsequently changed ownership and was not available to us for months due to renovation, so we found a new restaurant to meet at, but it did not have a separate and quiet enough room for us. Thanks deeply to our member who came up with the idea for this new location, and made it a reality.

If you are at all interested in mindfulness or meditation practice, and in an alternative to cutthroat relationships among lawyers, this is the place for you. 

All lawyers, legal professionals, judges and law clerks are invited to join our monthly gatherings -- usually held the last Tuesday of each month -- starting with our inaugural meeting at the following date, time and location:

Not one who is big on traditional county and state bar association activities, I feel that these Contemplative Law Group gatherings are a great way to further powerfulness as a lawyer by furthering mindfulness practice while also better understanding that everyone is interconnected, and to use that understanding for a better advantage in serving clients.

Mindfulness and meditation by now are in the mainstream in society, where they always have belonged. Here is my blog entry on the June 2012 contemplative law retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery.

Please RSVP to me, jon@katzjustice.com, 301-495-7755, ext. 224, or else drop by unannounced. We already have at least eight attendees confirmed, from a cross section of government law, prosecution and criminal defense, law firm practice, public interest, a law school chaplain, and mediation and alternatives to lawyer practice. 

I look forward to seeing attendees there.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

Recently, I bumped into a fellow lawyer when both of us were on the way to Maryland criminal court. I mentioned my intention to move to dismiss my case for being improperly charged by citation rather than by a statement of charges. (The case ended up getting dismissed when the prosecutor's witness did not appear.) My colleague had never considered such an idea, at least not for this particular criminal accusation, and kept asking me about this defense rather than simply showing by words or silence that he was going to arrange to read the citation statute, which I had already cited to him. Md. Crim. Proc. Code § 4-101.

Criminal defense is about defending people's lives and liberty, using all the lawyer's skill, experience, persuasive ability, true grit, passion and entire person. Sometimes the work is like panning for gold. It might feel exhilarating to get a criminal defense victory by hearing a resounding jury acquittal, but getting a case fully and finally dismissed well in advance of trial on an novel or obscure argument or piece of evidence wins the defendant's liberty sooner, reduces the defendant's angst, and saves the defendant on his or her litigation budget. The goal is to win, no matter how the lawyer gets to the victory, so long as the lawyer works honestly and within the bounds of law.

Criminal defense is not for mere dilettantes, not when criminal defendants' lives and liberty are on the line; not when persuasion in criminal court requires knowing the case and applicable law backwards and forwards; not when the criminal statutory and caselaw involve so many nuances, opposing lines of caselaw, and counterintuitive and even exasperating rules, tests and results; and not when too many judges too often find ways to avoid giving criminal defendants the relief they are entitled to, under the rubric of harmless error, lack of caselaw supporting relief (even when the applicable statute dictates such relief), waiver of rights, and lack of authority or jurisdiction over the matter when the judge does have such authority and jurisdiction.

Nobody in his or her right mind would go into the boxing ring against the world's heavyweight champion without experience, wits, courage, and daily focused training and exercise. The same goes for criminal defense lawyers. Unfortunately, dollar signs and empty coffers can entice lawyers to foray into criminal defense if they find the clients; foray not for such mere reasons.

Yes, any professional needs to start somewhere. However, the difference between the dilettante and the devoted criminal defense lawyer is the difference between dabbling and taking on each case as if the life and liberty of the lawyer himself or herself -- or the lawyer's closest friend or relative -- depended on it. No area of law -- particularly criminal defense -- should be viewed by the lawyer with dollar signs rather than as a way to serve clients, with money being a fringe benefit. I have had some lawyers tell me, unabashedly, that the practice of law is all about making money. They should not hold their breaths for me to refer cases to them. When I need to refer someone to a lawyer because of a conflict of interest or calendar, geography, or area of law, I want a lawyer who truly cares, is truly capable and is truly attentive. I want a lawyer who is a true believer and true doer.

What about my colleague, then, who kept asking me about my citation-dismissal argument rather than stopping the action by simply resolving to read the applicable statute? He is not necessarily a dilettante. If he did not care about finding expanded ways to succeed for clients, he likely would have paid little attention to what I had told him. He did not, though, engender confidence in me to the level of referring any clients to him, in part because he did not already know this basic area of the law, and did not exhibit that he was just going to read the short applicable statute for himself.

Devoted criminal defense lawyers are always ready to brainstorm with colleagues, and to expose their personal and intellectual weaknesses and fears in the process, out of the goal first and foremost of serving the client. However, adding to the mix of brainstorming is the necessity to fully and repeatedly engage with and do teamwork with the client, and the essential and often painstaking process of the criminal defense lawyer's being alone with his thoughts and ideas. Criminal defense lawyers on the winning path welcome all opportunities to get closer to victory, and do not feel lonely, but totally alive, when alone in thought and preparation for each client's defense, only missing having nobody else in the room to high-five when the lawyer discovers a new breakthrough towards winning his or her case.  

Today's blog entry is meant partly to urge lawyers to stay away from criminal defense unless they are going to jump into it full force, with their full true belief, devotion, heart, soul, time and attention, intellect, and experience. This blog entry is also meant to encourage criminal defendants to seek out such lawyers, not the ones who just talk the talk, but who have shown that they are walking the walk. The walk cannot always be easily found, but must be found, including researching and observing the lawyer, paying close attention to how the lawyer talks and pays attention to the potential client, reading some of what the lawyer has written, and asking the lawyer why s/he practices criminal defense.

I am grateful to know many true believers and true doers in the criminal defense practice, with all being great teachers to me by their teachings and example. I thank and deeply bow to them all.

 By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

Once the Oval Office secret taping was revealed -- followed by my being convinced that Nixon knew about and kept mum about the Watergate break-in, let alone his involvement with covering up the scandal -- I told myself by age eleven in 1974 that I did not like him. Not helping Nixon on my assessment of him were his looks (not ugly but not photogenic nor kind-looking, either; I had many years of challenges to overcome lookism), the political cartoonists' wild caricatures of him, and my view that he was anything but cool when the counterculture's strong inclusion on the airwaves was still recently strong. Pat Oliphant's image of an isolated and lonely-seeming Nixon awkwardly commandeering the peace symbol into a victory sign (in my view) summed up my not being able to relate to the man.

I later learned that I would have been wiser to have opposed Nixon for some more extensive and overlapping reasons, removing any issues about his looks or demeanor. As I understand it, Nixon saw few boundaries on presidential power, and, thereby dangeroursly threatened individual liberties and the balance of power among the three branches of the federal government. He used smear tactics -- including playing on anti-Communist fears -- to advance. He apparently kept an enemies list. He was very bigoted. He ordered a burglary of the Brookings Institution, a pre-Watergate break-in at that. I learned that I could not dislike him so much for secret oval office tapings -- with the tapes' ultimately strangling Nixon's presidency -- because they started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continued with Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.

Nothing, though, is black or white, all good or all evil, or done in a vacuum. Nixon would not have taken and consolidated power absent many people supporting his doing so. Not everything he did was bad; for instance, regardless of his motivations, he placed a diplomatic focus on reducing tensions and nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and paved the way to diplomatic relations with China.

Barack Obama does not come across as a Richard Nixon. He seems to mean well without being obsessed and paranoid over his opponents, and without seeming to wield presidential power for his own image and legacy. I have never been crazy about Obama, and believe that his "no drama Obama" approach goes too far. All shrewd politicians have learned to do their best to avoid what Nixon did to suffer the downfall of his presidency.

Now, regardless of President Obama's involvement or knowledge (and any failure or not to disclose the following scandals), he has two huge scandals on his hands that were reported last week: The IRS's admission that it targeted conservative political groups for audits, and revelation of emails from the State Department seeking to mislead the public about the cause of the Benghazi killings of American diplomats.

I doubt that Obama would have directed nor allowed the IRS to target anyone for political reasons. I have not explored enough how much responsibility Obama did or did not have for misleading initial explanations of the cause of the Benghazi killings. However, Obama by now clearly knows about both scandals. What will he do to explain his role -- or lack therein -- in the scandals, what he will do to fix the situation, and what he will do with the government personnel who caused and perpetuated these scandals?

Abuse of governmental power is not limited to any one political party. We are stuck in a Tweedledee-Tweedledum American two-party political world that is a far cry from a true democracy when considering the stranglehold that the Democratic and Republican parties have on the political landscape. Both parties have consolidated too much power. Huge power breeds greater risk of devastating abuse of that power. The federal executive branch has a hugely powerful bureaucracy that tends more to perpetuate itself than to reform from one presidential party to the next.

As to criminal justice, few politicians are willing to risk their careers by pursuing a massive overhaul of the criminal justice system to criminal defendants' benefit. Law and order tends more often to get politicians elected than campaigns to move away from America's incarcerating more people per capita than any other nation, even China.

So long as the United States government remains so powerful, gross abuses of power will continue.

Praised be Claude AnShin Thomas, who metamorphosized from killing scores of people during the Vietnam War to being an example of living internal and external peace and compassion, creating a new relationship with our own suffering, and acknowledging and coming to terms with our own internal demons. Thanks also to Brother Claude's spiritual partner and assistant Wiebke KenShin Andersen, who manages his public appearances.

I challenge anyone not to be profoundly changed for the better after experiencing one of Brother Claude's presentations or reading his book At Hell's Gate.

Claude AnShin Thomas will be in Annapolis tonight through Saturday, on the Real Costs of War tonight (open to all) and tomorrow (for veterans only), and the Courage to Change all day this Saturday. I highly recommend experiencing him.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

Over four years ago, I blogged about the strength of work as play and play as work. Numerous times I have written about the power of summoning our child within.

I sometimes summon the image of my mentors Steve Rench to my left, Jun Yasuda to my right, and Cheng Man Ch'ing to my rear when in the courthouse. I add to that having my son in front of me. I became a father in my fourth decade. If anyone helps assure that I stay in touch with my humanity, it is my son, now seven. If I even dared to say even one word of legalese to him, he would grab me by the arm and pull me over to play.

My son and I play a lot, and recently we started hiking more often on the Billy Goat trail, which is one of my favorite hiking places, and now my son's as well. Last Thursday, I had my first chance to experience with him Take Your Child to Work Day, after court finished. He handed my legal memorandum to the court clerk, and got a date-stamp back for me. He helped me pick up discovery from the prosecutor's office. At my office, I showed him how to use the copier, fax machine delivery to my efax, and scanner. He has come to my office many times on weekends, but not often duringthe weekdays.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, my son reminded me to incorporate play and the power of my child within into my work. Before going to court, we got a snack around the corner, and played the table's video game together. On arrival at my office, he started off with playing on Nick.com before we got to work on copying, faxing and scanning. I handled meetings and other obligations while he took care of business in an office that was not being occupied that day.  

We went to dinner at the end of the day at the restaurant of his choosing, Potbelly. On the way there, my son wanted first to race up and down the inviting wide stairway in the nearby plaza.

This was an afternoon and evening always to remember. Deeply thanking and bowing to my son, and hugging him closely.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

I have been to places that experienced murderous violence or attempted murderous violence, but not when the violence happened. I visited the beach in Netanya, Israel, in 1979, and learned that the beach was evacuated the next day when a bomb was found and defused. I worked for a year after college nearly in the shadows of the World Trade Center, which was a bombing target before being destroyed on September 11, 2001. I visited a prosecutor at the Pentagon in 1998 to get discovery, and was around ten miles from there on September 11.  In all likelihood, now-convicted snipers John Allen Mohammedand Lee Malvo were at the YMCA while I worked out there that morning, and probably numerous times before that. I grew up just around three towns from Newtown, Connecticut. I went to college outside Boson, and spent scores of times in the blocks where the recent marathon day bombings happened.

I feel deep sadness, at the very least, over all violence, not only mass violence, terroristic violence, nor violence taking place nearby me. Open today's newspapers, and you will see a tidalwave of reports on worldwide violence, including suicide bombing, suicide murders, and mailing deadly poison to a legislator.

Before the Berlin Wall fell, terrorism inside the United States was limited. For instance, many Afghans who allied with the United States against the Soviet domination in Afghanistan are now violently hostile to the United States, no longer having a greater enemy in the Soviet Union to align against.

Terrorism within the United States has also been domestically grown. Witness Timothy McVeigh (trained in violence while in the United States military) and Terry Nichols with the Oklahoma City bombing, where a rush to judgment first had many focusing on non-Americans. Witness the sniper attacks by John Mohammed (also trained in violence while in the United States military) and Lee Malvo, where a mistaken suspicion that the terrorists were driving a white van led to numerous unconstitutional stops and investigations of white vans and their drivers,

Violence begets violence. Violence needs to be a last resort -- if any resort -- in trying to stop violence. It takes more time, resources and effort to get at the roots of violence, but without doing so, we will continue living in a very violent world.

I have no easy answers for reducing and stopping violence. Certainly, achieving a peaceful world will not happen before each of us achieves peace within ourselves. Violence also will be reduced significantly when more people do not feel so powerless, desperate and oppressed that they buy into violence as an answer and violence as a way to heavenly paradise.

Before September 11, the United States already was a very civil liberties-repressed national security police state, despite the beauty of the Bill of Rights and the many judges who courageously uphold it. If not, we would not need the American Civil Liberties Union, for starters. September 11 gave an excuse to pass the PATRIOT Act and to exercise other oppressive government measures that have made the United States government all the more oppressive, thus feeding into the hands of terrorists to upend American society. 

Even a man as apparently well meaning as Barack Obama perpetuates the oppressive national security and police state, through such actions as favoring warrantless monitoring of communications between people abroad and those in the United States, through pursuing detention without bond of presumed-innocent criminal defendants, and through advocating crabbed interpretations of the Bill of Rights before the Supreme Court and lower courts. I certainly appreciate Obama's pursuing ending direct U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he continues advocating drone attacks and resorting to the secret FISA court system.

Each time we fly, we see the national security police state at work. The United States incarcerates one quarter of the world's population and has the highest inmate population per capita, which would not be the case if drugs were heavily decriminalized.

The United States remains far from the land of the free, rather than being too much the home of the caged. Each of us, collectively, has the opportunity to reverse the police state that we live in.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense lawyer and DWI/ DUI/ Drunk Driving lawyer advocating in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and beyond for the best possible results for his clients. http://katzjustice.com

The following blog entry is a reprint from my April 16, 2012, posting:

The District of Columbia remains a colony, at least for having been denied statehood right to this day. If D.C. statehood has not become a reality during the presidential administrations of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, when will it ever become a state?

Hawaii became the last state, fifty-two years ago. How much is race a factor in the denial of statehood to Washington, D.C., which for decades has long had a black majority, although that has fallen to near fifty percent. Other obstacles to D.C. statehood include Republican concern about D.C.' overwhelmingly Democratic voting record, the small size of the city (under 700,000), and possibly its having been carved out of Maryland without a sufficiently influential movement to encourage retrocession of D.C. back to Maryland, except for the federal enclave stretching from the Capitol to the White House and Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.