It is all about the client. We don’t exist, as attorneys, but for the client. The client’s interest comes first.
Well, maybe not if you’re a public defender in Colorado.
I’m not a huge fan of Youtube celebrity gun lawyer Andrew Branca. I’ve written about him a couple of times here. But the Colorado State Public Defendner used Branca as an expert or consulting expert on a self-defense case, and (I have heard, and have no reason to disbelieve) they won the case for their client.
Then they invited Branca to make a continuing-legal-education presentation at their office. And things didn’t go as they might have hoped.
The values Branca espouses in the public domain, it turns out, are in direct conflict with the office’s “mission and the work we do in the state to try to ensure our colleagues and clients who are members of minoritized groups are treated with equity and inclusivity.”
(More about that mission in a moment.)
More immediately, while he “did not openly verbalize the racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ+ views” that he posts on the internet, at the CLE he did “treat Black women, and women generally with disrespect and disregard consistent with those views.”
Specifically,
You arrived at the space where you were scheduled to present well before your presentation was scheduled to begin and found that the room was already in use for yoga by several women, including female BIPOC defenders and a BIPOC mental health expert associated with our agency. Rather than reacting with professionalism by leaving the space until your presentation, you continued into the room, making noise, disrupting the session, and turning what was a sanctuary space for those defenders into a harmful and toxic space. When a Black female defender attempted to bring your disruptive behavior to your attention, you behaved as if the problem was her reaction to your conduct, rather than your conduct. Your response was a gendered racist microaggression against the very defenders for whom the conference was being offered and who you signed on to educate.
We are, tragically, not informed of the gendered racist microaggression, but this sounds a lot like how a socially inept person might behave in such a scenario. And tell me this guy’s not on the autism spectrum:
But aside from his rudeness before his presentation, we are told that “aspects of his presentation cause racial harm to the BIPOC [black, indigenous, people of color] community.” More specifically,
The portion of your presentation that is racially offensive is the section in which you show pictures of fake and real guns.
How are pictures of fake and real guns racially offensive?
The slides you added, without our consent, are racially insensitive and perpetuate a narrative of police murders of children like Tamir Rice, Jor'Dell Richardson and the police shooting of a 15-year old as yet unnamed Hispanic child in Fresno that we categorically reject as false.
…
Your decision to include these slides did real harm to our Black and brown defenders, all of whom have a right to expect conference will be a safe and inclusive environment for them to learn.
Your position that the police murders of Tamir Rice and Jor'Dell Richardson and the shooting of an unnamed Hispanic child were justified because these children were holding toy guns in not just offensive, it is legally and morally untenable.
Categorically rejecting a legal theory as false and morally untenable smacks of religion, not analysis. Continuing,
Your assertion that that these officers' actions were legally justified self-defense because they had formed a mistaken but reasonable belief the three ehildren posed a lethal threat to them.
Feel the spluttering rage in that sentence fragment.
Public defenders defend people. They defend people who kill children. Colorado is more than 60% white; the CSPD might be called on to defend white people who’ve killed non-white children. Public defenders might be called on to defend people who kill children holding toy guns. These public defenders should be able to hear a view that such a shooting was justified without freaking out.