Thursday, December 18, 2014
Two years probation. When Lawrence and I first talked about his case I told him that the criminal justice system is a big, slow machine that only grinds one way. Mercifully, after six years his outcome has left him bruised and abraded, but not crushed or mangled. Make no mistake-- this is a big win. Nearly a hundred people in the courtroom-- it was packed. A big thing was that at the end, when Probation asked about installing monitoring equipment on his computer the judge said, No, that they could access his computer if only they had reasonable suspicion that his use of the computer violated his terms of probation. That's huge, I think-- it tells us that he got it, that he understood that whatever was on the hard drive was there through no fault of Lawrence's. I'll be elaborating on all of this in next week's edition of The Public, but one anecdote that I'll share here and not there is this: after the court adjourned and everyone filed out into the hall, one of the Marshals came up to me and asked if my coat was in the cloakroom. I'm no amateur-- I know to take off my outer things before I enter a federal courtroom, so of course it was, and my fedora, too. He walked me back to the cloakroom, and told me that people were going downstairs to the main lobby. "If it was me," he said, "I'd be going somewhere to have a party." It was a good insight from a guy who has seen a lot of sentencings, and in fact that's what we did. We went to Hallwalls and toasted the courage and endurance of Lawrence Brose.
// posted by Bill @ 10:03 AM 
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