The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Lara Bazelon on Kamala Harris

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

Lara Bazelon is a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She directed an innocence project at Loyola Law School and was a trial attorney in the Office of the Federal Public Defender.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and The Atlantic Magazine. She is the author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction.  

Okay. Okay, good evening everybody. Welcome to Live from the Table, which is actually live from Maine tonight. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm the owner of The Comedy Cellar. I'm here in a contracted cast tonight. We have just Perrie Lash and Brand and a very, very important guest. Her name is Lara Bazelon, is a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy. Her numerous published works have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Slate, and Atlantic Magazine, and the Atlantic Magazine. Her first novel, wow, will be published in 2021, and her book, Ambitious Like a Mother, about well-ambitious mothers. I'm sorry I said it without the hard R, will be published in 2022.

She is the author of Rectify the Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, which brings us, I think, to the subject number one that we really want to talk to you about. So we just got word that Kamala Harris has been chosen as president, as president, as candidate Biden's vice president. And I feel like the world is gaslighting me because everything that I understand about politics and morality and standards is just being blown up. And I cannot, I can't, I can't get it all to make sense. You wrote an article in the New York Times. I'm trying to, you got to bear with me because I'm doing six things at once. So in your article in the New York Times about Kamala Harris, I'm just going to start with this. You wrote, time after time when progressives urged her

to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then as the state's attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. This is the key part now. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony, and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors. Now, is that, you stand by that still? Yes.

So, and you, has there been pressure on you to take that back? Yes. But facts are stubborn things. I don't take back a single sentence of what I wrote. It's a complicated story. And it's not to say that her positions haven't evolved over time. But every single thing I said in that op-ed is factual. And that's why as angry as it made some people,

they can't fight me on the facts. So let's get to the heart of the matter. How is it that at a time of Black Lives Matter, that we could have someone who fought to keep innocent people in jail as the vice president? So I think it makes sense to back up a little bit and talk about what prosecutors reflexively do, and that is they fight to uphold convictions. And the cases that you're talking about are extreme and disturbing. And I talked about, I think, three out of four of them in my New York Times piece, and then you cited to other sources. This is, however, quite typical, which is to say

that prosecutors generally, and particularly until recent years, have had this mentality that to win and to stay in office, they need the support of the police and law enforcement and their own office, which tends to skew towards being as tough on crime as possible, and that undoing a conviction is somehow a signal of weakness rather than strength. And starting about, I would say, seven to 10 years ago, a lot of people began rethinking that approach. And so what we're seeing now is a wave, really, of people getting elected on platforms that are exactly the opposite. She predated that wave. But I think the problem was that when she was campaigning for the presidency, she claimed to be a progressive prosecutor. So she claimed the mantle of this new wave of folks who's doing things exactly the opposite, where they are saying, I'm going to go into court and undo this. I don't care if your petition is years too late. I don't care if you didn't check that

box. I'm going to do the right thing. This is a more recent development that we've seen and the voters have embraced. So it's true that the movement is evolving, but it's also true that you can't campaign on a characterization of your record that's not accurate. And so that was what I was pointing out when I wrote what I wrote. All right, so, I mean, I can divide it into two kind of things that I understand. I understand the tough on crime prosecutor who's fighting to, you know,

uphold the three strikes to your outlaws and these kinds of things. Can you really understand that? Because I can't, but go ahead. Say that again. I can't understand that. I can't understand upholding three strikes, but go ahead. No, when I say I can understand that, I mean, I can understand. Well, let me use a better word. I think there's two separate situations. One is an overzealous prosecutor going by the book, as it were. And whatever we might think of it, and I don't support the three-strike laws.

I never did. Is saying that's the law, and I'm not backing down. They did it. I don't care what was one of the cases I read about somewhere else. I don't care if it was just an attempt to steal a power tool. It's a third felony felony and they're going to jail for life, which is, I don't know how you live with yourself if you do that. But that's the law is written so you can hide behind the law. But I cannot understand, and I actually consider it evil,

working to keep an innocent person in prison. End of story. At a time when, I mean, let's compare it. You have a guy, some cops now, realistically, I don't think they're realistically going to get convicted of second degree murder, but realistically charged with negligent homicide for someone who they're trying to arrest. And I don't see that in a tremendously morally different universe than a prosecutor who is trying to keep a guy on death row

who is likely innocent from exonerating himself and being put to death. I don't even see it in much of a different moral universe from just keeping anything, any innocent person in prison? What is more totalitarian and frightening and Castro-like, Fidel Castro-like than having the government work to keep you in jail even once they know that you're innocent? What am I missing here? So what you're talking about is what I call innocence denying. I equate it to climate change deniers who think that climate change is a hoax or people

who think that the Holocaust didn't happen or people who think that COVID-19 is fake. It's a very high level of irrationality that exists in the mind of a prosecutor. And oftentimes it's their deputies who are driving these decisions, right? It's the people lower down the food chain. And so the response is, well, these decisions are being driven by my deputies and I afford them this power to make these decisions. But you're right. At the end of the day, there's just no excuse for it at all. And there's no excuse for enabling your own employees denial. And that's the only way that I can really explain to you how these things happen because it's antithetical to reason. But I will push back

on one thing. You said that prosecutors with respect to other things like three strikes can hide behind the law. And you're right that they can, but they should not. And it's not like, oh, geez, my hands are tied, three strikes. Prosecutors always have discretion, always, in cases of innocence and in cases of guilt. So if you have a potential three striker who stole change out of a parking meter, don't charge that. Plead it down. Charge it to something else. You don't have to strike somebody out just because you can. You don't have to keep an innocent person locked up just because you can. Prosecutors have enormous amounts of power and they should be using it for the good. And actually

that's consistent with their mission, which is to do justice and not lock up as many people as possible. Yeah. Well, I completely agree with you. I don't know if I, if I did, if I didn't make that clear, I was just really trying to make the case that there is a legal, there is a legal structure, which the prosecutor can say that exists and they're upholding when they do such things that we might still think are reprehensible, but there is, it is a total violation of your oath. And it's like, I keep coming back to the word it's evil. It is evil. I mean, if, if Netflix did a documentary of five different prosecutors that work to keep innocent people in jail and they named that documentary profiles and evil,

nobody would, you know, blink an eye. They'd think, yes, of course. The story's about the Central Park Five prosecutors. Now we're in a situation of a binary choice where somebody can say, listen, I don't care. I hate Trump so much. Trump is such a menace that I'm going to vote for Biden anyway. And I kind of understand that argument that when you only have two choices, you have to choose what you think is going to be best for the country, no matter what the circumstances. But this was not a binary choice. He did not have to choose her for this. And so the reason I started by saying it, it, I think the world is gaslighting me. I've spoken to maybe a dozen liberal Democrats over the last couple of weeks.

Some of them pretty well-known journalists. And I've been sending them this stuff. Some Harvard professors, I say, well, how can you support Kamala Harris? I mean, to me, you had only two options. Either you say, no, this is not true. She didn't do these things. Or absolutely, she's disqualified.

How is it that the people who were up in arms about Trump University, I mean, talk about, you know, a minor thing in comparison, they thought Trump University was serious, but this is not serious. And then to talk about, so I mean, I think you agree with me. It's not defensible. It's just not defensible. It's just not defensible. Now you brought up the fact that maybe her deputies maybe never got to the top. Is that really plausible given all the stories that she really didn't know? I think it's plausible that some of them didn't get all the way to the top, not all of them. So you cited a really famous case, the Kevin Cooper DNA case that absolutely got all the way up. I think there's a couple of things to say about this. One is the defenses in

these cases are technicalities. So in all of these cases, what her deputies were arguing was you're too late, or this isn't the right law, or you represented yourself and you didn't raise your claim in exactly the right way. And those are all tools that the prosecutors can hide behind, just like you were saying they could hide behind the three strikes law. But just because you can hide behind it doesn't mean that you should. And again, just pointing to prosecutors today, a lot of the progressive ones are saying, look, if you're innocent, I'm going to waive the statute of limitations. I'm not going to hide behind that technicality. I'm not going to weaponize it to cement your conviction and lock you up for the rest of your life. Now you're talking about, okay, have we made kind of like a deal with the devil? And I, you know, my response to that is the ticket is the ticket.

And on the other ticket, there are two monsters. And I don't think that anything that Kamala Harris has done in her entire life that I know about comes even within a football field of the harm that Donald Trump does to this country every single day. And I just don't think there's a comparison. In my mind, it is really about facing down the apocalypse. And so that's why I think you're hearing a lot of what you're hearing. I mean, I don't want to speak for other people, so I'm just going to speak for myself and say that. Right. But my point was that this was when he, Biden could have chosen Susan Rice or somebody else. And we wouldn't have to be rationalizing this. I mean, I'm really having trouble. So, you know, in Vox, Vox says,

a close examination of Harris's record shows it's filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that help people find jobs instead of putting them in prison. But she also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. First of all, I think it's a bizarre paragraph because it's setting off. Well, on the one hand, she fought for some good programs. But on the other hand, she fought to keep people in prison after they were proved innocent. That is not two sides of a coin. But I mean, let's just get to, let's just get to the heart of the matter. Did she knowingly fight to keep people in prison after they were proved innocent? Her office did. Yes, absolutely. And, and and was like, I can't wait to do this. No.

But I think that when you run an office, whether you're the DA or you're the attorney general, you are responsible. You are ultimately responsible. But is it, is it plausible when this is going back and forth and this is. The contentious situation and it's, and is the arguing going on about it. That it never got to the top that, that this person that we're arguing about has been proved innocent. I just don't, I don't, I don't buy that.

I don't know that you can say in every single case, but let me give you an example. No, just one case is enough. Well, right. I mean, so let me give you an example of, I think there's two kind of interesting cases to compare with her record when she was AG. So let's start with number one. This guy named Johnny Baca, he was convicted of basically being

the gunman in a shooting of this gay couple that the prosecution theorized was orchestrated by one of their sons to get the couple's money. And he used this guy, Johnny, to carry out the murder. The prosecution did all kinds of crazy stuff at trial, not her prosecutors, prosecutors in Riverside County, to get this conviction, including putting on an informant that lied and putting on a prosecutor who also lied. The case then comes all the way up through the state courts and the federal courts, gets to the highest federal court except the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit, and the AG's office is defending the conviction. And at the time,

this very famous judge was the head of this panel, and he just raked her deputy over the coals. And he said, you're not going to like the way this decision is going to come out, and the attorney general is not going to like it either, and you don't want your name on this, and neither does she. I suggest that you go back and talk to her. And a couple of days later, they dismissed. They just dismissed the case. So obviously, it made its way up. And that case, that argument has been viewed tens of thousands of times, which for law school nerds like me is basically like going viral. Okay. Same year, different case, George Gage. George Gage, clearly innocent. He was convicted based of this horrible series of sexual molestations based on his stepdaughter's testimony. It was her word.

Years later, no other evidence. The prosecutor held back reams of information, including her psych records, where her own mother referred to her as, quote, a pathological liar. And she lives her lies. Never turned it over. The trial judge, when she found out it's sentencing reversed, that was undone. Again, it travels all the way up to the Ninth Circuit. Again, Kamala Harris sends her deputies in. Again, the Ninth Circuit expresses a lot of concern about this case because the prosecutor cheated to win this case and actually, interesting, was running for DA at the same time and then won right after he got this verdict.

And they bring all this up and the deputy just raises the usual defenses. This guy didn't raise his claims in the right way, blah, blah, blah. And the Ninth Circuit sends them to mediation, which is basically like, hey, make this go away. But George Gage's case didn't get any attention. If you looked at it, you know, a couple hundred people looked at it. He didn't have a famous judge. And the judges didn't actually say what this other judge said in Johnny Baca's case. George Gage is in prison. He's 81 years old. He's never getting out unless by some miracle, Governor Newsom grants him clemency. So it really matters how much attention you're able to get to penetrate through those layers of bureaucracy

and get the person not just to pay attention, but to feel enough political pressure to do the right thing, which is disturbing on a lot of levels. And that is such a horrible story. I can't even, I can't even, I can't process it. Now just go, you know, the last thing, this is from the Washington Examiner, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it just goes to the list of, she fought to keep a misidentified neo-Nazi in prison after the case was tossed.

When her office sought to retry, a man had been set up. Her office sought to retry a man set up by police. She fought compensation for a wrongly convicted gang shooter. When her office defended the sexual assault conviction of an electrician, it was based on a technicality. When her staff prosecuted a reality star who was framed by the police. I don't know. I'm almost, I don't know what to say about it. I don't understand. And what is going through the mind of the party that at this moment in time, but it would be the same at any moment in time, but when Black Lives Matter is the most important issue of the day, that they would have somebody as vice president who did

these things. Can you explain it? Why did they choose her? So I have a couple of thoughts about it. I mean, I'm obviously not privy to Joe Biden's thoughts. He's certainly not calling me. But I think that in looking at the totality of her record, they probably felt, and I think this is true, that once she went to the Senate, and I grant you in the Senate, you don't have the same kind of direct control and power. But once she was there, she was on the right side of a lot of things. So now she's pro-marijuana legalization. Now she's pro-bail reform. She's come out publicly and said that she regrets denying Kevin Cooper his DNA testing. And she supported a lot of bills, including bills coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement that are designed to rectify and address racial injustice.

And so I think there's probably a feeling that she has evolved in a way that's substantive and demonstrable, and that the positions that she took in the past, like the positions that Joe Biden took in the 80s and the 90s, were not atypical of centrist, ambitious Democrats of that era. So if you recall Joe Biden trying to out-tough everybody on the crime bill, he was behind this awful 1996 legislation that we're still living with today. And so she is actually, quite frankly, to the left of him, although conceitably that's a very low bar. But you also have to think about who's doing the choosing here. Yeah, but then you're back into my distinction.

Joe Biden's being tough on crime. She's keeping innocent people. Keeping an innocent person in jail is not being tough on crime. Oh, believe me. Because of stuff that Joe Biden has done, innocent people are in prison. I mean, it's too technical and lawyerly a conversation to have. But the legislation that he supported has indirectly led to horrific consequences, including the consequence of that guy, George Gage, that I was just talking about, because that

technicality that she weaponized was in place because of a law that he helped to pass. So it's all this to say it's very interconnected. And I know this isn't going to make you feel any better. It's going to make you feel worse. But when you do the kind of work that I do, it is typical. It is literally typical to come in to a prosecutor's office before you go back into court and say, this is my whole case. Here's all of the evidence that my client didn't do it.

They tell you to go fuck yourself. You go to court. You decimate them. And then at the end of the day, they walk out and say, we disagree with this. 12 million years ago, 12 people convicted this person. And when you say, yes, of course they did because your deputies lied and stole, or the defense attorney was asleep. They'll just repeat back to you, 12 people convicted, 12 people convicted, 12 people convicted, your client confessed. It doesn't matter if they were tricked, coerced, beaten. It's just that there was this initial result.

And it's a very, very hard thing for people who aren't in the system in all of its muck to wrap their heads around because it's so irrational. Well, but there's a case where they find out a conviction is falsified and she still fights to keep the guy in prison or whoever was in prison. I'm sorry, I'm listening with open mind, but I'm not convinced. I see as a different category as overzealous laws that have terrible consequences, the kind of collateral damage consequences.

And they are just as horrible to the person who's caught under the thumb of these laws. But morally, to be the person knowing that the person that you're going to keep an innocent person in prison and lay your head down on the pillow and then be elevated to be vice president of the United States. I mean, if she had told an ethnic joke 10 years ago, she probably would have been disqualified, right? Let's be honest. I mean, given the world we live in, it's possible. We live in a really crazy world. I mean, you have to wonder what's going through the Democrats' mind

that they undermine themselves. They're going to have a protracted convention, but Bill Clinton's going to speak at it. This is, you know, when Me Too has barely grown cold now, after Gillibrand and everybody, and everybody's basically come to the conclusion, well, no, we're sorry for the way we gave Bill Clinton the benefit of the doubt. We're pretty much, it comes to the conclusion that he probably did do it. That was the convention. And now, oh, we're going to have him speak at the convention like we never said any of these things about bill clinton probably the incredibly accused of rape and then we're gonna we're gonna have someone who put innocent people in jail like we never said all

this stuff about the the justice system and then we're gonna talk about how bankrupt the republicans are morally well i i do think i mean, I'm a completely liberal lefty person. And I think that the Republicans are operating on a completely different level of evil magnitude on the evil scale. But you're also right. You can't get more evil than the people in prison. You can't get, there is no additional magnitude

of evil scale than that, in my opinion. Well, I think that there's some Republicans who are way, way, way over on the evil scale than that, in my opinion. Well, I think that there's some Republicans who are way, way, way over on the evil scale. But we could debate that forever. I mean, I think what you're getting at and what's really upsetting for you and probably for a lot of your listeners, viewers, is this idea that we have such arbitrary judgments, that as you say, that somehow Bill Clinton gets grandfathered in and gets a pass when it's pretty obvious that he did some pretty terrible things and that we're going to have him speak and have this huge platform when if he had done what he did in the last two or three years, he would be completely canceled.

And then we have people being canceled for things that are pretty outrageous, basically speaking their mind. And so those people have no voice and in some cases, no job. And then you have this other alternative reality where other people just sort of don't seem to be being held to account in the same way. And I think it is a head exploding thing because the standard feels like not only is it constantly shifting and moving, but it seems like it's very arbitrarily applied also. Yeah. I mean, I'm, okay, I'm not, I'm pretty nonpartisan, but I'd say I'm right of center, although not right of center on criminal justice matters or on first amendment. I guess I'm libertarian more because, and I've always felt that way, but on, you know, like on the economy, I'm probably right of center on foreign policy. I'm right of center. But I come away from this saying, what do they take me for? Like, they are embracing one after another, the embodiment of the very opposite of what they claim to be all about. And it's come to a kind of a critical mass with Bill Clinton, with Kamala Harris,

even with the way, I mean, they're finally coming around. They were dismissing looting, dismissing, and I own a business and we had a very, very scary couple of nights in New York where we didn't know what would happen. They're boarding up the windows and all the stuff like that. And the mayor was telling the police to stand down and what's her name uh nicole hannah uh what's the last name nicole hannah uh no call hannah jones no hannah jones

from the new york times somebody you know destruction of property is not violence it can be replaced and similarly i'm saying well why is a movement which is really at core about protecting innocence so ready to look the other way when innocents are being victimized? Like, yeah, I'm just a store owner. I'm innocent. I'm as innocent as the guy who gets beat up by the cops. Like, what is so hard here to protect all innocents?

Would you compromise your cause there by also saying, no, we don't want anybody innocent to suffer? But they can't do it. And wherever I turn, I just see that they express a principle, but there's no sign that they're really ready to live by it. Bill Clinton is fine. Kamala Harris is fine. The looting is fine. What do they stand for? Well, I think that it's a very large and unruly movement, right? And it's a movement that's gained a lot of power and traction, particularly since Donald Trump was elected. So it's chaotic and there's a lot of moving parts

and there's a lot of growing pains and there's not agreement within the movement. I mean, there are very many people on the left who are not happy about Kamala Harris being the vice president. And there are many people on the left who have similar concerns to the concerns that you've expressed. And then there are many people on the left who are more in the camp of looting a sort of a byproduct in the same way that there were people in the Me Too camp who were like,

well, wrongfully accused men are just sort of a byproduct of justice for women, right? You're always going to have within a movement, just a wide swath of people, especially a big tent movement like Black Lives Matter, particularly because everybody now wants to say, I'm for this movement. It went from being something that was like very controversial to a bunch of suburban white people putting up those signs. So yeah, you're pointing to a lot of inconsistencies, but I think that's pretty, I think the inconsistencies are consistent

with the way that movements like this form and break apart and come back together over time. Do you disagree with me? I just, I, listen, I'm not, I'm not naive and I'm not a purist. I do understand compromises. I do understand holding your nose and voting for someone. But these are the people who were very much talking about this disqualifies Trump.

This disqualifies Trump. They live in this world of absolutes. And I just think they're full of shit they they they immediately you could see it i mean i don't know if tara reeds telling the truth not telling the truth more you know even during this whole covet thing a couple other witnesses came out that said that she told them about the assault at the time but the way they quickly moved to find a way out from under that Tower Reed situation. It was so hypocritical. Believe all women, believe all women. They just weaponize everything. I just feel that it's just

opportunism. I don't know what they believe. I don't, or the Republicans. I mean, I hate them all, but I mean, I really do. Can I ask you a question? Are you going to vote in the presidential election? No, I don't usually vote. Why? Because I live in New York and it doesn't matter who you vote for. And I just, I'm very upset about this Kamala Harris thing. I was a big, listen, I disagree with Susan Rice on a lot of things, but I was a big supporter of her as vice president because she's the real deal.

If you read her resumes, you're a Rhodes Scholar. She was first in her class. She, I mean, this woman is a tremendous woman of accomplishment. Agreed. I mean, there's no, you can't dispute that. you really said this is the case, but if she actually had no idea what was going on in the prosecutor's office, and that's the only thing she's actually done, then for that reason alone, how would she get elevated from being a totally lousy head of a prosecutor's office, didn't even know what was going on, to vice president of the United States and perhaps president of the United States? This is the most qualified person in the country to be president. Or are they just exposing what conservatives will say, which is it's an

affirmative action pick. It's all about skin color. There's actually not a single thing about this woman, which would get her within a mile of the presidency, other than her DNA, as opposed to Susan Rice, who has every business in the White House. Is there anything that she's done, anything about her resume, anything about this woman? The voters didn't like her. Any reason that she should be vice president and perhaps president other than her DNA? And if that's what it is, let's just say that's what we've come to. All that talk for years, you're a law professor. For years, it was, no, quotas are terrible. That's not what it's all about.

It's about finding the best people, elevating the best people. There's no argument for Kamala Harris that I can see outside of her DNA. That's sad to me. So I'm going to push back on that. I do not think it's affirmative action at all. I think, and believe me, I've been critical of her, obviously. And that's why I'm on the show. But I don't doubt that she's incredibly smart and talented. If you watch her, I mean, the debate that she had on The View with John McCain's daughter, Meghan McCain, about the defund the police, just watching that couple of minute

interaction, you could see how smart Kamala Harris was and how she made Meghan McCain look like an absolute fool. And you see her do that in Senate hearings, and you see her do that in various other aspects of her life. And that's because she has not just a gift for being deft. It's also because she has a basic understanding of these issues and how to frame them and how to push back in a way that's quite frankly hard for a lot of women to do because we get judged on this totally different standard. And she does it in a way that brings people around to her point of view.

So when she's on the right side of things, which she has been more and more recently, she's an incredibly powerful advocate. And I don't think you can doubt the fact that she has unbelievable charisma and political instincts because look at what she's done in the course of her career. I mean, she was the first black woman elected DA in San Francisco. Then she was the first black woman elected attorney general in the state, the only one. These are huge milestones. She had to convince people who

were not inclined to vote for someone like that and who were like actually racist to take a chance on her. Now, is that to say that everything else is excusable? No, but I do not, not, not in my bones believe for a second that it's about affirmative action. I think that she is a talent and she's very smart. So that's my take. Let me, let me say, just to be clear, I don't equate with what I'm saying with saying she's not smart. She's obviously smart. She's also treacherous in some of these situations. Like she was treacherous with Joe Biden, the way she called him racist and the busing thing and all that, which turned out she didn't mean at all. But she's been effective.

But that is, I mean, I'm sure you could be just as effective and you're probably just as smart as she is to know the issues as well as she is. That doesn't make you the most qualified person in the country to be president. Can I ask you something? When did we elect the most qualified person to be president? When? Or vice president? When? Was Dan Quayle the most qualified? I mean, I'm not even equating them. She's miles ahead of him. But Sarah Palin, was she the most qualified? No, those are terrible picks. What about that guy who got indicted, Edwards, John Edwards? Was he the most qualified person? Should he have gotten the Democratic nomination? There's so many people, right? Yeah. So let me answer that. I think Quayle was a terrible pick. And Sarah Palin was obviously a

Hail Mary pick that McCain did, although it was recommended to him by Bill Kristol and some of those neocons at the time. And I guess, I suppose he thought because she was a governor of a state, she must have certain qualifications. Mike Pence, Andrew Johnson, talk about a horrible president. Pence, I would say, is qualified to be president, but you don't agree with his views. Pence was a senator and he's been an effective governor. I think he was a backbencher congressman and he's completely homophobic and believes in gay therapy. But what I'm saying is that outside of their views, the president has to run something. And she ran the prosecutor's office badly. And the office she's going to run now is more challenging that office and much more

consequential. There's plenty of smart people who can't, who are not up to that job. And there's been plenty of bad vice presidential picks before, although this is a particular one because Biden is so old and appears so frail and, you know, maybe even feeble. I mean, he's not, nobody knows what to make of him. I had someone on the show a couple months ago who said that sometimes with age, speech impediments recur and reemerge. And it's not a sign of cognitive decline that he might be as sharp as he ever was just having trouble with his speech. On the other hand, I've also been reading that it also can be a sign of cognitive decline when they reemerge. And I mean, the guy, nobody knows. Nobody can say with confidence, but at 78 years old, actuarially,

the chances are, you know, much better than a typical president that she'll take over. And I just don't see when I say for an action pick, I don't, God forbid, I don't mean that she's not smart or that she's not talented, that she's not capable at certain things. But to be president of the United States, no, I don't see that other than the fact

that she is a black woman. I don't see that. She doesn't have political appeal. Well, can I ask a question? I mean, given what we're up against, it seems she's, at the very least, as qualified as Donald Trump is.

I mean, if we're talking about who's qualified to run in office, I mean, he certainly isn't. And I'm not excused. Well, that's why, Peril, that's why we wanted to have Lara on prior to the pick, because I was, because I was trying to avoid this very, I was trying to avoid what I knew would be the pitfall,

which is that once it's a binary choice, it becomes a different set of, then it becomes proper to compare him, to compare the ticket to Donald Trump. And if you- Are you sad that you couldn't box me in in the way that you were hoping? Are you disappointed?

No, not, maybe, you know, that I can see why you're saying that, but that's not what I mean. I meant, I just- Are you sad that you couldn't box me in in the way that you were hoping? Are you disappointed? No, not maybe. I can see why you're saying that, but that's not what I mean. I know I'm teasing you. I just think I could not understand why she was even being considered. I didn't see on her record on what she's accused of as a prosecutor compared to, are they really worried about Benghazi? Is that why they don't choose Rice? I don't know what their, what their thoughts are. By the way, the polls show, this was in the times that in the swing States, over 90% of black people, over 90% of black voters didn't think it had to be a person of color.

They were fine with any of the best qualified people. That's a really interesting piece of polling data. And that's been consistent throughout sort of before and after George Floyd. It's very interesting. And it's true. I mean, she's quite vulnerable to this. And let's see what else comes out of that prosecutor's office. But I don't know. Like I said, I just, maybe I'm just, I don't know, maybe I'm a moralist in some way. I can't reconcile myself to the idea that we could knowingly choose somebody who kept innocent people in prison. I just can't, I can't get over it. And I'm pretty good at getting over things, you know, but I can't get over that. I don't know. What else?

What else? So what about, you have opinions on, did you see the most recent, I don't know if you want to talk about this. The most recent. Yeah, I'll talk about it whenever you want to talk about it. Let's talk. Did you see the most recent George Floyd videos of the arrest?

No, tell me. Well, I don't, you know, if I, even by trying to tell you what I saw, people will immediately accuse me of spinning it in some way. But trying to be fair, did you see it, Periel? No. All right. So what it was this, they picked him up and he was kind of psychotic. I mean, in the village, he reminded me of like a homeless guy kind of ranting in the

village. But the interesting parts about the thing were the following. He kept saying, I can't breathe prior to them holding him down or doing anything which would have prevented him from breathing. So he might have been having trouble breathing all along because he had COVID, because he had drugs in his system or whatever it is. They found him in a car, then they tried to put him in the police car. And he said, I can't get in the police car, I'm claustrophobic. But he'd just come from a car and they didn't force him into the car.

They tried to force him in. I think finally they did get him in and he came out of the car. And finally, I think they gave up on trying to force him into the car. And they were pretty patient with him. They said, we'll open the window for you. They weren't belligerent with him. I left out right at the beginning, a rookie cop, I think it was his first day on the job, pulled a gun. And then I think one of the other cops told him to holster it.

So just so you know, I didn't leave that out. But other than that, they were patient with him. And at the end, they decided to make an ambulance and they held him down with this hold which apparently is a hold which is was in the minneapolis or minnesota police i'm getting that echo again in the minnesota police training manual it's called an it's called a non-lethal neck hold or something like that, which is they were trained to do this. Well, that's an interesting euphemism for what it actually did. It was pretty fucking lethal. Well, depending on which autopsy and what it is. But clearly it was, I mean, there's some people out there now saying that they think he might have dropped dead anyway, or that it was some weird perfect storm of things.

But I'm not trying to say it wasn't lethal. But what it does seem now, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm being honest. When I first saw that George Floyd video, I thought I saw a Nazi indifferently torturing a man who was crying for his life. And I said that many times. It was very hard for me to watch that video because I was sure that's what I was looking at. What it looks like now, it might have been, is an officer who was tuning this guy out because he'd been ranting for 10 minutes prior about not being able to breathe. And he just wasn't taking him seriously anymore which is why I think second

degree murder is just intentional intention of killing the guy I think is just out of the question now but it could still be a negligent homicide although if he's trained that this is non-lethal, I don't know what the law is about that. I mean, you know, so anyway, it's become a much, much tougher prosecution, I think by far. And it's interesting that they didn't release these videos earlier. And you probably know something about this. It seems like they overcharge these political cases and it comes back to bite them. Well, so I think the legal theory that he's charged under is really worth talking about because it's a pretty interesting and controversial

theory. And it's also, I think almost all the states actually have it and it's called felony murder. And a lot of people think they know what it is, but they don't. What it basically means is you intended to commit some lesser crime. Like, let's say I intended to burglarize your house. So I show up to get your pot and I don't think you're home, but you are home. And we get into a struggle and I kill you. Before two years ago in California, that was first degree felony murder because burglary is a felony and you died as a result.

And so even though I didn't intend to kill you and I didn't go to your house to do anything other than steal your weed, I'm going down on first degree murder, 25 to life. And most states have some version of that, including the state where officer Chauvin is being charged. So that's the theory. The theory is that he intended to commit a lesser crime, in this case, aggravated assault. And then as a result of that, George Floyd died, and therefore he is liable for George Floyd's murder. So that's the theory. Is that second-degree murder? That is second-degree murder.

And in some states, it's first-degree murder. In California, it's first-degree felony murder. Although we just changed our law, which is why I've nerded up on it. But here's what's interesting to think about with felony murder. I call it FMR. Traditionally, what it's been used to do is incarcerate disproportionate numbers of people who are Black and people who are of color. And traditionally, it's been used to go after people who were, in a lot of cases, maybe

the girlfriend or the sister or the accessory, the driver, the person doing sort of the ancillary thing in the case, but they go down for the most serious thing. And so in California, we had a big debate about felony murder, and we ended up revising the rule to make it not possible to convict under the theory that I just told you. But in most states, it is possible. And in fact, they do it all the time. And there are people in Pennsylvania doing life without parole under felony murder. So what's sort of crazy about this is you're taking this very controversial rule or statute or theory that's been disproportionately applied against people of color and actually

is a big tool in mass incarceration, FMR, and you're using it in these officer-involved killings. And that's true in George Floyd, and it's true in a couple of the other ones as well. And so it's interesting to think about that. So the felony would be assault. I think they're going to have a hard time with that. But felony murder gives you a chance to leap over intent. So what the prosecutor will say is,

you don't have to worry about intent to kill, ladies and gentlemen. You don't have to worry about whether he wanted George Floyd to die. All you have to think about is whether he intended to assault him and whether his use of force was aggravated, et cetera. And if you make that finding, then you just go straight to first degree murder. You just leap that intent to kill hurdle. The law does that for you. I understand that. Actually, I didn't realize they were using felony murder for that. I feel uninformed. So the law said, as I recall, that

they can use this hold if he's actively resisting. And I don't know what actively resisting, how that's defined, or if there's precedent on what actively resisting means, but he wouldn't get in the car. And I mean, I don't know. It's such a horrible, horrible thing. I don't think you could say that he was actively resisting by like minute two, three, four. I mean, I don't know. It's such a horrible, horrible thing. I don't think you could say that he was actively resisting by like minute two, three, four. I mean, what's so crazy about that video is that it went on for almost nine minutes and they're at no point during the entire filming of that,

I don't know what happened before. And I believe you when you tell me what happened before, but you just can't justify holding someone down like that when they are not resisting and when they're begging for their life. And we'll see what the jury does, right? Juries do not like to convict in officer-involved killings, but this may be a case where they literally can't look away from the video. Yeah. The funny thing about the actually resisting that I was wondering,

and I have no idea what the answer is, is that if you're holding somebody down because they're resisting, that's it. I mean, you hold them down until the ambulance comes because you assume that, well, if you get up, they're going to get up again and continue to resist. So you're just holding them down. Now, there was something else in that video where one of the officers suggests turning him over on his side and Chauvin says no. And that's pretty ugly. And cold. And cold. But like I said, there is, if you listen to it, you do hear him saying the same thing about not being able to breathe before

he was being held down. It's just, it's so, it's so great. You just imagine some cop who's been trained that this is not a lethal hold. And that's, and if he is trained that way, and then there's even some talk that they were actually maybe retrained, but they're nobody sure if Chauvin got the retraining to be more careful about this. But if he is actually trained that way and he's told that it's not a lethal hold, and then he's holding this guy down.

And, you know, and they didn't, I would have thought they would have just rammed him in the back of the police car and say, shut up. I've seen cops do that when somebody didn't want to get in a police car. I've seen brutal cops in New York just force somebody into the back of a police car. I never heard a cop saying, okay, okay, we'll roll down the windows. You know, if you see the first part, it was totally incongruous with someone who later murdered him. And that's going to weigh on the jury.

I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of different ways to get to a murder verdict. So in your mind, you have a concept of murder in your mind. That's a very common traditional concept. And what I'm telling you is that there's a lot of different legal avenues for a jury to get to that spot. Yeah, I understand. But I feel like, you tell me if I'm wrong, that the jury is going to work backwards. If they don't think this guy is guilty of murder and should be punished like a second degree murderer, they're not going to find that he committed that felony. I think they're going to work

backwards. I would. And it's something as technical as felony murder. I wouldn't feel constrained to say, well, if I think he committed an assault, well, if he gets the chair, it's out of my hands. I'd be like, no, if he's getting the chair and I don't think he deserves it, then as far as I'm concerned, he didn't commit the assault. That's what I would be as a juror. And that actually is consistent with the reason that people are rejecting felony murder is it just doesn't seem fair if you don't think the punishment is fair. So I guess it's kind of a notification. So it's interesting that you say that because, okay, so I've completely, completely nerded out on this, but in California, there was a case back

in the seventies involving this kid, Dylan, he was 17 and he wanted to rob this farmer of his weed. And he and his little friends snuck up with their, with their revolvers. And then the farmer came up behind this kid and he, he panicked and he turned around and he just shot. He kept pulling the trigger, pulling the trigger, pulling the trigger. And of course he, he, he killed him and he went to trial on first degree murder and the jury struggled for days. And they kept sending notes out saying, can we do something else? Can we do something else? Because they understood that they were, their hands were tied. And actually that's what the foreman said to the judge, our hands are tied. We don't want to do this to this kid. And the judge said, this is a very

harsh rule and operated very harshly in this case. And then Dylan went to the Supreme Court and argued, basically this violates the constitution. It's an eighth amendment problem harsh rule and operated very harshly in this case. And then Dillon went to the Supreme Court and argued, basically, this violates the Constitution. It's an Eighth Amendment problem to do this to me because he got life without the possibility of parole for this case. And the California Supreme Court said, this is crazy, but we can't undo it. It's a creature of statute. And they called it barbaric. And they called it a prostation penalty, meaning that there was this guy named Prostatius or something, who was this innkeeper in like the 100 BCs. And people would come to his inn and if they didn't fit in the bed, he would saw off their arms and their legs so that they fit. And that was the analogy with FMR,

that you basically are sawing this person off to fit them in this box. And that's the idea behind felony murder, which is why I think, as you're saying, a lot of people struggle with it. Now, you know, if you were ever going to have it, a lot of people would say, well, I don't like it, but it belongs in a case like this because it makes it easier for jurors to convict somebody like Officer Chauvin, because he probably didn't wake up in the morning thinking, well, I want to kill George Floyd today, but it lets them get there through a different route. What you're talking about is what happens inside the jury room when people are really grappling with these questions. And there's a lot of mixed feelings and dissent. But if it goes like the Dillon case and they feel like, quote unquote, their hands are tied, then, you know, felony murder gets you to that murder verdict. So it'll be interesting to

see what happens. And then the other thing in the video is that you don't see, now, I don't know if that, you can't prove a negative, but you don't see any element of a racial incident there. You just don't see that. He wasn't hateful in the way he was talking to him. He certainly didn't use any racial epithets. They seemed patient with him until the end. So it, it. But don't you think that it's almost impossible to conceive of a video like that? If the races were reversed, do you honestly think that there would be a video like that of a black officer holding his knee down on a white suspect's neck for almost nine minutes until his life was extinguished? There is one, there is one just Tony Tempa, you know, Tony Tempa. No, I'll send it to you when we get off. There's a video. It's a white, I think it's a white officer killing a white guy in Texas, almost identically to the George Floyd.

He's screaming for his life. The officers are joking and he drops dead. He's saying, I can't breathe. It's almost identical thing. As a matter of fact, Coleman Hughes wrote an article where he did a deep dive into all this. And he said that he was able to find a situation of a white person being killed by the cops in almost identical circumstances to every one of these high profile cases of a black

person being killed by the cops, which is not to say that any black person killed by the cops didn't actually have the extra element of racism to it it's just it's just hard to prove but i would i was ready to see a hateful nasty cop which would have made it easier for me to say well you know let's look at the way he's talking to him you don't talk to somebody that way without a little being ginned up a little bit by a little racial hatred right but you actually don't see that. So it's, it's going to be tough. It's going to be tough for the, for the jury, I think. And then I would still, there's like an underlying issue here because you're, you know, everybody wants this sort of classic villain who's screaming a racial epithet as they're doing what officer Chauvin is

doing. They want the whole package, but it's the bigger problem that so many police officers, whoever we're talking about are trained to just see people as disposable? Or even if they're not trained that way, years of experience on the streets kind of hardens them to the point where they're looking at people and they're thinking that they're doing bad things and they're thinking that their lives aren't worth that much. And that's a real problem, just generally speaking, with police and the people they're policing. Yeah, but I'm going to say something, and I know you're going to agree with me. As much as I might think that something in the aggregate happens a lot and is a serious problem, I immediately know that when I'm talking about an individual defendant, I have to take exactly the opposite posture, which is you cannot use the fact that a thousand other white cops have done something despicable as evidence in this particular case.

You have to prove to me, you have to prove to me in this case that he did it and he was raised and all that stuff. You sound like a defense attorney. Were you a defense attorney in a previous life? No, I wasn't. But I feel I'm a very, very much innocent or proven guilty guy. And let me tell you something else. I'm even so far to the left or right on this, whatever you want to call it, that I've been open to the argument for a long time that prison itself is cruel, unusual punishment. Knowing some of the stories, like I know it's crazy because I don't want all these criminals out on the street. I don't know what the answer is, but the fact that the state puts people in jail and knows that terrible things are going to happen to them there, torturous things,

and could stop it, but they don't stop it. That's barbaric to me. That reminds me of, like, you remember Sabra and Shatila when the Israelis let the Palestinians have their way with the Lebanese Christians, you know, about, or I'm sorry, the Lebanese Christians, Israel, and there's a big controversy in Israel that Israel looked the other way while the Lebanese Christians slaughtered the Palestinians. It's kind of what we do. And I'm very pro-Israel, by the way, but that's what happened. And that's kind of what we do here. So I'm, yeah, I'm very, very... Can I tell you another parallel story along that track that's kind of an interesting intersection, I think, between Black Lives Matter and Me Too?

So I have these two different clients, okay? One of my clients is wrongfully convicted. He is innocent. I would stake my life on it. And he went down when he was 19 based on a cross-racial identification. He was black, The victim was white. Crime took two minutes. $100 was taken and he got 60 years with no possibility of parole at 19,

no history of violence in Louisiana in a hellhole. Okay. So he is being basically routinely sexually assaulted by a guard and in a way that's pretty much incorporated into his everyday life. The guard shoves his hand down my client's pants and rubs on his penis. If my guy wants to go visit another friend in a tear, he comes sometimes sneaks up on him in the bathroom. This has been going on for years. So my client says to me, you know what? I just, I'm done with this. I want you to file a complaint under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. So I do. I call Crime Stoppers and I file this complaint. And as a result, massive retaliation, solitary confinement. I mean, unreal. He's in a cell where there's no fan in Louisiana in August. Okay. It's like 110 degrees in there.

They're literally torturing him. There are cockroaches crawling on the floor. I mean, it's just an absolute hellscape. Okay. That's client number one, right? And this is someone who with a credible repeated allegation of sexual assault, who by the way is completely innocent and should never be there. Okay. Let's move on to client number two. Client number two is a college student at a very fancy college and he's also black and he is accused by someone who he was dating at the time of putting her hand on his erect penis while they were both fully clothed. That's the accusation, without her consent, and insisting on a handjob. The school is taking this allegation incredibly seriously. You wouldn't believe the amount of process that there has been in this case on this cross-racial accusation. We have been around and around and around. It's been almost a year now. He's going to have a hearing and he could very well be expelled. So I just want you to try to

wrap your mind around those two things. Because if we really care about sexual assault, how can you possibly say that this is appropriate, that this level of scrutiny is warranted for an alleged Title IX violation on a college campus, but my guy is getting the treatment that he's getting in a place where he's not supposed to be. And when I try to report it, it gets even worse. When those two things happened at the same time, I literally thought that my brain was about to explode. When you talk about cognitive disson I feel physically ill over this and over the twisted intersecting nature of these cases, it makes me sick. It actually like physically affects me and it mentally affects me, nevermind what it's doing to my clients. Yeah. It's making me sick hearing about it. I agree with you. And the bubble of my head while I'm hearing it is that prosecutors

know about this stuff. They know, they know this is what goes on in prison. They're hip. They don't care. They don't care. Right. But that's why, that's why, again, I'm, that's why I'm saying like, don't tell me Kamala Harris is not evil. If she, if she, if she worked, I don't care. It is going to fall on deaf ears that if somebody fought to keep innocent people in prison, if somebody thought that somebody

thought that someone might be innocent and on death row and they don't want to let them have a dna test i can't i can't it's not a partisan thing it's it's it that's there's no left or right on that as far as i'm concerned and i it just repulses me and i i don't understand how how the i mean you know and you know it goes even deeper actually i want to say before because we don't understand how the, I mean, you know, and it goes even deeper, actually, I want to say before, because we don't have a properly skeptical media. I mean, I was impressed that the New York Times ran your column, but they wouldn't have run it closer to the day that he had to choose. And it wouldn't have run it post, I don't think they would have run it post cotton editorial, but the times is the paper, which should have done the very deep dive into this. They do the best deep dives into issues of any paper that's ever existed.

And they knew this was out there. And, and she was the, the, you know, the favorite pick for almost two months, but when I didn't get anywhere near it. But what I am telling you is this is happening every single day. My client went down in 2013. This wasn't in 1975. It wasn't even in 1997. It was in 2013. I mean, it's just unfathomable to me that this could happen. And it happens. It literally happens every day. And it happens mostly to people who are poor and people of color because nobody cares because their lives are completely disposable.

So let's do this thought experiment then. I'm going to get you to agree with me. What's that? It's about to get very noisy in here. Oh no, tell me. So let's do this thought experiment. Let's say the prosecutor that you were dealing with or the person you were dealing with

on this thing for your client, it was it was being said was kamala harris there would be nothing i could tell you 10 years later to say well she's on the right side of things now you're like no i'm sorry she did this i was in the office she was heartless and that's forever that's forever as far as and i think you would agree with me if you had the face, if you experienced it personally with her. It's really hard not to feel, it's really hard when you are the lawyer in these cases, not to feel an unbelievable amount of hatred and rage because I've litigated them and I've been in trial with prosecutors where it's been clear that their case is entirely fallen apart. And I had one also in 2013,

my client did 34 years and he was innocent and the evidence against him was fabricated and it all came out. And in the middle of trial, the judge called the prosecutor and me up to the bench and she said, what are we still doing here? And the prosecutor said, what do you mean? And she said, why are you still going forward after everything that's come out? And he said, well, in 1979, 12 people convicted, and we have the right to try to uphold this conviction. And I remember standing there at the sidebar and just feeling this sense of overpowering rage that my client's entire life had been spent behind bars based on these crazy lies that had just been exposed witness after witness after witness. And he wasn't denying that they were all liars and that he actually was saying that and

dragging us through the rest of this process. I was, I have a very, I will never be able to get over that. So I understand what you're saying. And the people who prosecuted my Louisiana client and the DA, who's the DA there now, who's mercifully retiring because he is the worst DA in the United States, Leon Canazaro, is responsible for what happened to my client. Ultimately, I do hold him responsible. And I'll say something else about that case, which is there's this law called the habitual offender law in Louisiana, which means that you can start, you know, sort of doubling and tripling people's sentences up once they go down on one felony. And Leon Canizaro used that law over 2,600 times since he's been DA. And the neighboring DA in Baton Rouge, similar population,

used it 66 times. So you have to ask yourself, and this goes again back to this discretion and hiding behind the law, just because you have that giant hammer doesn't mean that you have to swing it every single time and decimate people. And it's a very upsetting thing to think that we're putting people in power who are doing that and how ubiquitous it is. And if people understood what was happening in these prisons and understood how people were being abused and understood how many people are in there who are actually innocent, it would be hard for a lot of people to sleep at night

and they wouldn't believe it. It's despicable. It's despicable. And I wanted to say, and then we're pretty much going to wrap it up, that the same way we're talking about the cops and all the history of the cops and how many of them listen, how many of them are racist, you know, is the same way, actually. It's that same connecting of the dots, which did

allow people to convict the Central Park joggers as they did. They're exactly the same profile as people who are actually out there every day committing crimes. So it became so easy to believe it that there they are convicted. Although I, you know, actually. But you know, the prosecutor all those years later, Linda Fairstein tells Jeffrey Toobin in a New Yorker interview that she still thinks they're guilty after the DNA came out. How do you explain that? And again, talk about outcomes. She goes on to have this career as a bestselling novelist. Where is the justice in that? It's well i i you know there was that commission um i forget what it's called that studied it and they they they came to the conclusion they thought the

kids may have actually committed assaults been involved in some crimes there but they were clearly not guilty of the rape or the attempted murder they didn't they were never near this person this poor woman i mean like who went through hell. That I'm not sure. It doesn't really matter to me because clearly the conviction was wrong. I mean, we're not shocked. Here's another thing I think to think about, and I know we have to wrap up,

but I do want to think about this for a second. Like a lot of these prosecutors say, I'm doing it for the victim. I'm doing it for the victim. Well, imagine being the victim and knowing that the person who did this horrible thing to you is still out there doing it to other people

because they rounded up the wrong person and tangled you up in that whole process and made you responsible. So now on top of being a victim, you feel like a perpetrator. It's profoundly wrong. Yeah. I don't want to be a coward and say that I haven't read about the Central Park case and felt that I wasn't totally convinced that they were completely innocent. You got it. But I was completely convinced that they were not properly convicted and they were innocent, obviously, of the crime that they were charged with.

So I'm going to send you two things when we get off. I'm going to send you that article about the Central Park Joggers. I'm going to send you the Tony Timpa video. I'm sorry that I was so tongue-tied at the top of the interview. I had this terrible echo and I couldn't, I've never experienced that. I couldn't get a word out. I didn't think you were tongue-tied. I thought you did great. All right. Now you're supposed to tell me that you thought I did great to make me feel better. No, I was about to say, you were fantastic. I would like to have you on again, and maybe we'll have you on when one of these trials start, the Arbery trial

or the Floyd trial. You should watch the video. I'd be curious to know what you think. I do have this thing that I, I know that people get mad if I say, but it's just painful to me to see if it would happen in any case where a cop who is risking his life to protect people is trained to act in a particular way, acts in the way he was trained to do it. Clearly, there was some arrogance that went into it where, you know, turn him over on his side,

whatever it is, but then winds up in prison for the rest of his life. I don't know. Maybe, maybe he deserves it. Maybe deserves it. But there is also something terrible about the municipality that trains the cops to act in that way. And then when it blows up in their face, since then they've changed the law, they've changed the training, they've changed the regulation and this guy will be languishing in prison and he will say without with some justification i did it the way they told me to do it you know they told me it was non-lethal and now i'm in jail that's that's well i have a couple things it's just a tough

moral thing it shouldn't happen that way you know i'm not in the weeds on the minneapolis police officers training manual but I have to believe that that's not what they meant. And in any event, I think two things. One, you might consider consulting with the defense. And two, I think that the arguments that you're raising are absolutely going to get raised, right? I mean, they're going to get raised and the jury is going to consider them.

Now I'm just thinking about it through my defense attorney hat. And then ultimately, it's going to be up to the jury to decide. And you're right. These are, yeah. I mean, I think that the widespread condemnation and the video is just being as shocking and awful as it is. It may be enough to just play that video. But I also think that there's going to be a bunch of things

that the defense is going to raise. And that's why trials are endlessly fascinating spectacles centuries later, right? Because it plays out in ways that no one ever anticipates. Yeah. You got to watch this body cam video. And I can't believe I'm saying some of the things I'm saying because I was so adamant that there was nothing that I could see. Like, I don't care if I haven't seen the whole thing. There's nothing you could show me that would change what I've just seen in this video. This guy is just torturing this guy to death. I likened them to, at the time, to, you know, John McCain being tortured in a Vietnamese

prison camp. That's the way I saw these guys. But then you see this video of the guy, of them being kind of patient with him and offering to roll down the window. And then you find out they were trained to do this and they didn't, they didn't throw them into the car. And clearly there was something negligent about what they did. And I think I'm okay with negligent homicide, but it's just not what I expected to see. It's just not. And I'd invite, I ask anybody who is outraged at what I'm saying, take the seven or eight minutes

and watch the body cam video. You will be in some way surprised what you see why do i get a sneaking suspicion that you like to outrage people am i wrong i don't know no you're not wrong well you know you know what that is i think that most people have opinions that they keep to themselves that they know would outrage people and i i just i have trouble not saying what i think i'm i'm not soft on anybody, cost murdering anybody. God forbid, nobody should think that. I don't know. Am I saying something wrong? I mean, it's just, I think it's negligent homicide. I think it's negligent

homicide, but I'm not sure. Well, we'll see. We'll see, right? Yeah. Laura, where can people find you? So my Twitter is at Laura Bazelon. And then I have my academic profile, which you can just Google my name and my email address pops up scarily. Those are probably the two best ways. Hey, Laura, can I ask you one question? What have I said that makes you think that I like to outrage people? Every single thing that you've said the entire time we've been talking.

Even about Kamala Harris? I just think that you have a way of putting things where you are just a pot stirrer. I don't know if I'm saying stirrer right. S-T-I-R-R-E-R. Someone who likes to stir a pot. Isn't that what your column was in the Times? Wasn't that pot stirring? Yeah. I mean, I think what I always say about my writing is the only reason why anything I write ever gets published is because I'm saying what other people think, but are too afraid to say themselves. Oh, that's kind of what I just, that was kind of, that's what I just pleaded a second

ago. But I, you know, I will not apologize for storing the pot in behalf of the idea that innocent people being kept in prison is full-blown evil. I am very cautious about this Chauvin thing because all I want is for justice to be done there. And I'm very happy to see this guy languish in prison if he deserves it. I just, I'm very curious to see what comes out on the stand in that trial to use. And it was classified as the non-lethal hold because they have another hold which they're entitled to use when lethal forces

is appropriate. So it boggles my mind to know that this was something they were trained to use when somebody is resisting. And I don't know how that plays out in the law or in a trial or in the heart of a jury. I don't know. I just don't know. No one does, and that's why jury trials are endlessly fascinating. My clients, when I was a federal public defender, used to ask me what their chances were at trial, and I would say, well, if you plead guilty, there's a 100% chance you'll be found guilty and go to prison, and you never know at trial. You never know. And it's an indication of bad learning of our civics or our understanding of our own system that it does outrage people for somebody to spend the time to consider whether somebody

is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. People will take that to mean that somehow you're sympathetic, but that's not the case at all. That just, that's what we're supposed to do. You're talking about a presumed innocent person. That's where it's supposed to start. And people are not starting from that assumption. So that's where I'm starting from. Good. Well, hopefully you can motivate more of your listeners

to start that way too when they are up for jury selection. Yeah, I actually think- In whatever case. I think we see eye, do you agree we see eye to eye on most things actually? I definitely am a big believer in the presumption of innocence. And I'm also cynically convinced that most people look at your client and the first thing

that they think is, I wonder what he did. They don't think, what's that wrongly accused person doing sitting there? Which is what they're constitutionally supposed to be thinking. That's right. But you have to go back to the way the human brain works. We're not, our minds aren't constructed to think that way. Yeah, that's right. That's bingo. That's exactly right. All right. Well, this was fantastic. And I kind of want to keep talking because I, because I really enjoy everything you're saying. There's more pots and you could keep stirring and

stirring. Well, thank you for having me on. Yeah, that was fantastic. And I'll try to edit out that very part at the top where I have all that echo so I don't sound like a total dumbass. You did not sound like a dumbass. I'm going to email you in a few minutes the other stuff I want to send you. Cool.

Okay. Thank you very much. Cariel, you want to say anything? Why don't you tell everybody where they can email us? Podcast at ComedySeller.com. Podcast at ComedySeller.com. Podcast at ComedySeller.com. And you can also watch this episode on YouTube and listen to it. And you can find us on Instagram at Live From the Table.