Osler's Razor

Every once in a while you get a tiny bit of something just right.

This week, I felt that.  I spent most of my week in DC, training over 600 lawyers to handle clemency petitions for the Clemency Project 2014.   It was grueling and emotional-- we were trying to teach a very diverse group of people, ranging from experienced federal defenders to beginning associates at big law firms.  My colleagues in the project were wonderful, but the challenge was great.  If we do it right, hundreds or thousands of people will go free from prison having served a decade or more for non-violent offenses, and hundreds of millions of dollars will be saved.  It is something I have advocated for since 2009.  This is our chance, and the window may not be open for long.

Not all of what I did was great, or even good.  I should have put less text on my slides, I should have practiced more, I told a dumb joke about pumpkins.  I can be pretty awkward when I teach.

At the end of the two days, though,  I was answering questions from people in our audience that had been printed out.  The one I was answering asked about complex cases, and I addressed the discrete question.  But then I felt something bigger had to be said.  There was a camera recording it all and sending the images to screens, and I looked up to it, stopped for a moment, and then said something my students have heard me say before:  That tragedy is always complex, and that criminal law is all tragedy, every bit of it, and that is why it matters so much, why this matters so much; there is no simple tragedy.  And then I stopped, because the same instinct that told me to speak then told me to stop.

There is a lot more to do.  This is not a summer of rest.  But that one tiny bit?  I got that right.