UNDERDOG - Criminal Defense Lawyer in Virginia & Maryland

Cesar Chavez: A champion for the empowerment of workers and immigrants.  

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense and DWI defense lawyer practicing in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland and beyond. 301-495-7755. http://katzjustice.com. 

Your immigration status is your own business. Whether or not law enforcement personnel have the authority to ask you your immigration status, you have no obligation to answer. 

Certainly, people in the United States without legal authorization to be in the country should not answer such questions to people in the criminal justice system, including judges. In addition, people who are not United States citizens should beware of disclosing their immigration status to anyone in the criminal justice system, lest they be reported to immigration authorities upon being charged or convicted for an offense that could harm their immigration status. 

United States citizens can stand up for immigrants by refusing to disclose their immigration status, as well, to those in the criminal justice system. 

Certainly, when entering the United States, United States citizens and those with valid United States visas should disclose their immigration status if they wish to enter the country. Beyond that, what really are the negative consequences of refusing disclosure of immigration status to those in the criminal justice system? Unless law enforcement personnel have probable cause to believe that a person is not lawfully in the United States, the person cannot be detained for such suspicion. 

As to Arizona's draconian law targeting actual and suspected undocumented people, just last Friday and referencing Arizona’s immigration enforcement law, Virginia’s attorney general issued a legal opinion giving the green light for law enforcement personnel to inquire into the immigration status of detained people.  

Curiously, the Virginia attorney general’s opinion includes the following passage: 

It also should be noted that under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, state and local officers are required to advise foreign nationals of their right to speak with a consular officer when those persons are arrested and held for longer than a short period of time.16 It is difficult –- if not impossible -- to effectively provide that advice, mandated by treaty, without making an inquiry into the nationality of a person who is in custody.

However, just as judges may not inquire into one’s immigration status, http://katzjustice.com/underdog/archives/1948-Judges-may-not-inquire-into-immigration-status-in-criminal-cases..html, police may satisfy the Consular Relations Convention merely by advising an arrestee that if s/he is not a United States citizen, the person has the right to speak with a consular official. This avoids asking one’s immigration status. 

I believe that the United States’ immigration laws are too crabbed against people who wish to immigrate here. I also believe that plenty of anti-immigrant sentiments thinly veil racist sentiments. My views on immigration law, policy and procedure are informed all the more by my involvement in law school in 1987 with the immigration law clinic, and my handling two deportation hearings at the time, representing a gentleman seeking asylum from Ethiopia, and a green-card holder fighting deportation after a cocaine felony conviction. 

A huge number of non-citizens who are undocumented (that is to say, without documents showing they are in the United States with visas) are actually on their way to obtaining visas (or are awaiting the results of visa applications) or already have documented status without knowing it (including children of a person who obtained a green card without telling the child). Certainly, “illegal aliens” is an unfair term; nobody should be considered illegal merely because they are somewhere on the planet without papers to be there, and the only aliens should be beings from other planets. National boundaries are human-made and should not be permitted to hem people in too much. 

Both United States law and international law protect political asylees from deportation. Most people who obtain political asylum in the United States are undocumented at the time they have applied for political asylum. Clearly, then, people who qualify for asylum -– and the U.S. government routinely denies asylum to people who merit asylum (the factfinding is done at the Executive Branch level, not at the judicial level, unless an Article III court will re-visit such factfinding on appeal), including for cynical political reasons (e.g., often people are more likely to win asylum if they are from a country whose government is at odds with the U.S. government, versus a government that is a U.S. ally) –- certainly do not merit being called “illegals”, for instance. 

The anti-immigrant movement is hot to trot to marginalize undocumented people (and often to lump documented people in with them) as rule-breakers greedily seeking economic benefits in the United States while disrespecting non-citizens patiently waiting abroad sometimes for years for approval of their visa applications. In reality, plenty of immigrants still are escaping non-economic misery, and not just economic misery. Moreover, such economic misery often is created in significant part by the demand of U.S. consumers –- backed up by U.S. government support for governments permitting inhumane working conditions -- for overseas goods produced cheaply as a result of underpaid labor often required to work inhumanely long hours in horrid conditions (not least of which might involve severely limiting any breaks, let alone bathroom breaks). Just see what happens when you google “Nike Indonesia”. It sounds disingenuous at best to benefit from the misery of such mistreated workers and then to bar them from entering the United States to escape such misery. 

Anti-immigrant propagandists who try to portray non-documented people as money seekers, want people to forget those fleeing from wartorn zones, brutal governments, brutal courts, brutal jailers, and brutal military members. Refugees from Darfur and Burma –- as examples –- are fleeing oppression that goes far beyond the economic. 

Additionally, millions of people who want to obtain visas to permanently live in the United States are barred from doing so, because U.S. immigration law primarily favors white collar professionals and relatives of citizens and green card holders. Such people who are ineligible for visas are not cutting in front of any line, because no waiting line has been created for them in the first place; they often live in the United States as third-class citizens at best, as they do not automatically receive visas merely because they are in the United States. 

We are a nation of immigrants. The only people in the United States who can trace their roots to non-immigrants are Native Americans, and even their ancestors apparently arrived from other continents way back when. We honor immigrants and immigrants’ rights when we refuse to answers questions by police and judges about our immigration status. 

NOTE: Following is a reprint of what I wrote for July 4 in 2007 and reprinted in 2008 and 2009:

Whenever I look around on July 4, the scene is long on fireworks, beer, and merrymaking, and too short on discussion of what Independence Day is all about.

The Declaration of Independence was hardly signed by a bunch of pacifists. The signers must have realized that the bloodshed among the warring sides would lengthen and intensify with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it did. Violence begets violence, and the rampant violence that led to Britain's surrender did not take place in a vacuum. Instead, it has fed into all subsequent American wars and smaller military actions. The United States' repeated victories in wars (and the Vietnam War probably would not have dragged on so long were it not to become America's first war defeat) likely has made the United States all the more militaristic and cocksure militarily. 

By now, the United States government thrives on control backed by force, the threat of force, and punishment, not only through military might, but also through an overgrown and overbearing criminal "justice" system of police, laws, money, prosecutors, courts, and prisons;  an overgrown national security system that leaves us little privacy, security, or sufficient liberty; and an overgrown spying and "intelligence" system.

Fortunately, a strong movement continues in favor of civil liberties and government by the governed rather than the reverse. The movement includes the American Civil Liberties Union, fearless and skilled criminal defense and Constitutional lawyers, and the drug legalization movement.

July 4 is meaningless without an ongoing struggle for civil liberties. Now is the time to join that struggle.

By Jon Katz, a criminal defense and DWI defense lawyer practicing in Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland and beyond. 301-495-7755. http://katzjustice.com.

Ever since I was in my single digits in the 1960’s, I have been bombarded with images and details of some of the most heinous violence by humans against humans. Life magazine came to my parents, and I recoiled in horror at such photos as the daylight, on-the-street summary execution captured in 1968 by photographer Eddie Adams, and the 1972 napalming in a Vietnamese village that resulted in the image of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running desparately for safety but still getting severely burned by the napalm. On top of that was the 1968 My Lai massacre. 

When the foregoing images arrived onscreen, I had little context in which to place all the violence in Vietnam other than hearing one or more anti-war folks say that the United States had no business getting involved in the war there. 

As I later learned, the Vietnam War was hardly the first time that acts of such heinous levels (not limited to any one side, either) had taken place, but it appears that no previous war involved so much free rein of news photographers to capture the rawest of raw war images, and I was there in my earliest years suffering psychological trauma from such images, but certainly not nearly as traumatic as the people experiencing it firsthand. 

As a criminal defense lawyer for nearly two decades, I have defended more than my share of clients accused of violence against others, running from a few punches to the face, to rape that sometimes added additional horrors, to murder. I am sure that at least some of my clients committed such acts. 

How do I jibe my strong opposition to violence and strong leanings towards pacifism (but not total pacifism) with my representation of those charged with violence? There are many reasons, which I believe I have blogged about before, including that nobody’s rights are sufficiently protected if those charged even with the most severe crimes (even those who seem clearly guilty) do not get effective representation at such critical stages as the setting of bond and pretrial release conditions, the preparation for trial, settlement negotiations, trial itself, any sentencing, and appeals. I also do it out of compassion for each human being, although I have some real difficulty reaching compassion for some people, including Hitler, Pol Pot and David Duke. Additionally, I do it because I think that the existing criminal justice system is excessively unjust, in general, to criminal defendants.

How do jurors accept the artificially-seeming (to many) legalism of innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? That probably is not easy at all. Most jurors also have been traumatized several times in their lives learning of (and sometimes experiencing firsthand) horrific violence caused by humans against humans, and may wonder how violence is going to ebb and how violent people are going to get stopped if such “niceties” (as some jurors might see it) as “beyond a reasonable doubt” and the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule let alleged monsters hit the street again to perpetrate more monstrosities. In that regard, the criminal defense lawyer must humanize the defendant and try to show the jurors and judges directly or implicitly how they need not worry that the release of the defendant will result in any harm to anyone; that takes tremendous skill, empathy, compassion and sweat equity. 

Claude AnShin Thomas became a mendicant Buddhist monk years after killing hundreds of people in Vietnam. I met Mr. Thomas in 2005 during his speaking tour, and was taken by his dual approach of not denying or suppressing the anger that he still lives with -- which for quite some time led him to soak himself in drugs, alcohol, and sex -- but also doing his best to dissipate and reduce the pain and anger. When he is about to get angry, he accepts the feeling, but tries to dissipate it by focusing on his breath and on the sound of a bell, which I suppose helps get him back to concentrating on his breath and calm rather than on anger.

Brother Thomas was heavily influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh in his healing process. He was long out of the military at the time, which was sixteen years after the United States military finally pulled out of Vietnam in 1975.

Curiously, Cheri Maples remained a gun-toting police officer and police trainer during and after her first meeting with Thich Nhat Hanh. She found a way to inject the Buddhist approach of mindfulness into her training of police officers, including encouraging them to talk directly to other police personnel with whom they had beefs, rather than to let it boil into gossip and worse.

Ms. Maples ended up attending law school while working at night as a police officer, and eventually becoming an attorney with the Wisconsin Department of Justice. She also previously headed the Wisconsin probation and parole system.

Ms. Maples is currently involved in running the Center for Mindfulness and Justice, which includes incorporating her mindfulness training when she provides presentations to police, prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers and judges.

I just learned about Ms. Maples this weekend, through a Tricycle magazine article about her, which confirms that Thich Nhat Hanh was supportive of having a gun-toting police officer who understood mindfulness, than to have no such gun-toting police officer. See her speaking here.

In 2003, the Associate Press reported that Cheri Maples "said she struggles with ways to help officers handle the stress of police work. Instinct and training teaches them to take charge — which is good for police work but can be hard on relationships, she said. 'What police officers deal with over and over and over again is misplaced anger,' Maples said. “And then our families deal with our misplaced anger and frustration.'"

I was blown away that such transformations are happening among some police at the systemic level this many decades after the Sixties. I wish to know how widespread are the efforts to bring such teachings to police.

Today, too many people still echo the quote listed in the title to this blog entry at least in their minds. Longer ago, many more people -- police included -- would openly verbalize such thoughts.

Born in 1920 to a former slave, at the age of thirteen Percy Sutton was handing out NAACP leaflets in an all-white neighborhood, apparently in his home state of Texas.  The cop taunted Mr. Sutton: ''N-----, what are you doing out of your neighborhood?'' The cop then beat him up. 

Flash forward to 1977 -- when I was close to the age that Mr. Sutton had reached when he was beaten by the cop -- during the heated New York Democratic primary race for mayor, when I was in the New York television viewing area, and when I had not yet gotten as cynical about politicians as I am today, having viewed Nixon more as an aberration than as the possibly logical conclusion about much of what goes wrong with politics and politicians. During that mayoral race, I heard the mellifluous tones (see and hear his tones) of Percy Sutton, one of the contenders for that race that was ultimately won by Ed Koch.

Sutton's was a voice to enthrall and captivate jurors. I did not pay much more mind to Mr. Sutton -- other than recalling his interesting-sounding name and captivating voice from time to time -- until I learned this past weekend that he had passed away. I still do not know much more about him, except for the contents of his obituaries, including:

- Mr. Sutton had already been a lawyer for a long time when I heard him on television in 1977. His clients included Malcolm X and other members of his family.

- His father, an educator, was a strong influence on his civil rights path.

- After his military service during World War II, he attended Columbia law school, but switched to and graduated from Brooklyn law school to work around his two jobs "at a post office from 4 p.m. until midnight, then as a subway conductor until 8:30 in the morning."

- He re-enlisted in the military after mistakenly thinking he had failed the bar exam, and served in the Korean War.

- As the New York Times reports, he was "arrested as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s, yet once described himself as 'an evolutionist rather than a revolutionist' in matters of race. 'You ought always to keep the lines of communication open with those with whom you disagree,' he said."

- Mr. Sutton's law firm represented 200 civil rights marchers arrested in the South in 1963-64.

- Around 1965, he was elected to New York's state legislature. In 1966, he filled the interim vacancy of Manhattan borough president.

- He supported Charles Rangel to beat incumbent Adam Clayton Powell for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1970.

- During the 1977 Democratic mayoral primary, he stood strongly against crime. I wish to know more about those stands and the extent to which I agree or disagree with them.  

- The New York Times reports that "Mr. Sutton blamed the news media as much as his opponents for his [1977 mayoral] defeat. 'It’s racism pure and simple,' he declared."

- He served as president of the New York NAACP.

- He purchased historic Apollo theater when it was threatened with oblivion.

- Mr. Sutton located in and devoted himself to the advancement of the Harlem section of Manhattan. My last visit to Harlem a few years ago, particularly around the 125th Street area, revealed an economically vibrant place that has kept some of its defining hallmarks -- including the Apollo Theater -- along with the many chainstores. 

- He branched lucratively into broadcasting.

- Mr. Sutton's father told him: “Suffer the hurts, but don’t show the anger, because if you do, it will block you from being able to effectively do anything to remove the hurts.”

I wish I had met Mr. Sutton face-to-face. I send him good karma and pray Na-Mu-Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge-Kyo.

The District of Columbia and the surrounding Beltway/Route 495 are a true center of the dreaded government-military-industrial complex. On an individual level, many participants in the G-M-I complex are wonderful people, with many doing good things for society. As a whole, though, the G-M-I complex is overgrown, is overly oppressive, and is overly beholden to power structures rather than to individuals.

What would happen if the G-M-I complex participants -- and everyone else -- had access to lawfully-recommended, lawfully-grown, and lawfully-obtained medical marijuana? That day seems soon upon us, in the District of Columbia.

Marijuana is great medicine. After eleven years of federal Congressional blockage of D.C.’s  referendum/ Initiative 59 to legalize medical marijuana (see the law here) -- with D.C. residents being victims of taxation without fully-voting Congressional representation -- the U.S. House of Representatives last week approved an appropriations bill that includes a provision clearing the way for D.C.'s medical marijuana law to take effect. The Washington Post’s editorial folks expect the Senate to approve the bill, as well. 

D.C.'s medical marijuana law is expansive, including the right to grow, buy and deliver marijuana exclusively for those with physicians' recommendations of marijuana's medical necessity for them. Now my clients who use marijuana medicinally have a local venue for using it legally, rather than having to pull up roots and transplant themselves to the far-flung places where medical marijuana is currently allowed.

This news is big. The wonderful possibilities are huge.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to an emailer who alerted me to the updated status of the D.C. medical marijuana law.

Numerous law schools have American Indian law classes. Mine did not. I have wanted to learn more, including the law concerning treaty rights, land rights, gambling, and sacred medicine, and also about the past and current mistreatment and slaughter of Native Americans and efforts and accomplishments to reverse such mistreatment.

I took a particularly greater interest in Native American issues from reading Dennis Banks's Ojibwa Warrior (written with Richard Erdoes), and then meeting him in 2006 at the conclusion of the Sacred Run, and again in 2008 near the end of the Longest Walk II. We are both friends of Jun Yasuda, who joined Dennis from California when he went "underground to the Onondaga Reservation in New York" after California's Jerry Brown -- who refused to extradite Dennis to South Dakota concerning criminal charges over the Wounded Knee event -- left the governor's office.

In Ojibwa Warrior, Dennis Banks details his life from childhood, to being ripped by the government from his family and forced into a faraway United States government school meant to take the Indian culture out of Native Americans, and to his ironic joining of the military defending the same government that had forced him to that boarding school.

With the foregoing background, yesterday, September 17, I attended a meeting at the National Museum of the American Indian, where a roomful of lawyers shared ideas for creating an effective upcoming exhibit on the many treaties between the United States government and tribes. Many of the lawyers present have represented American Indians for years. Some previously worked at the Interior Department, and at least one still does. Several attendees are American Indians, including museum director and moderator Kevin Gover, who has worked in various posts involving Indian affairs.

During the discussion, I acknowledged that I remain very new to American Indian law, but that I feel it very important that the treaties exhibit include coverage of broken treaties, rather than just on their creation. It appears that the exhibit will indeed do this, and that in conjunction with or separate from the exhibit, the museum under Mr. Grover's leadership will, in his words, "deconstruct" numerous court opinions that get American Indian law wrong, as he sees it. A basic view of those in the room is that the treaties must be honored no less today than a treaty with France or any other sovereign nation, but that many Americans do not share this view.

Kevin Grover issued an apology in 2000 for the Bureau of Indian Affairs' role in the civil rights violations, when he was an Assistant Secretary at the Interior Department. Here is a viewpoint on Mr. Gover by Steve Russell, who has written extensively on American Indian law.

In addition to the many treaties between Indian tribes and the United States, many treaties were also entered into between tribes and Britain, and tribes and Canada. The museum apparently will include that area at its branch in Manhattan. The treaties exhibit will be both online and presented at the museum. Many issues various tribes focus on today with the treaties include water rights, fishing and hunting rights, and gaming/casino rights.

ADDENDUM: At my request, one of the attendees recommended two texts for learning more about American Indian law. One is American Indians, Time and the Law, by Charles Wilkinson. He also recommended a book by a writer named Washburn; I am not sure if he was referring to Red Man's Land; White Man's Law, by Wilcomb E. Washburn.

NOTE: Following is a reprint of what I wrote for July 4 in 2007 and reprinted in 2008:

Whenever I look around on July 4, the scene is long on fireworks, beer, and merrymaking, and too short on discussion of what Independence Day is all about.

The Declaration of Independence was hardly signed by a bunch of pacifists. The signers must have realized that the bloodshed among the warring sides would lengthen and intensify with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it did. Violence begets violence, and the rampant violence that led to Britain's surrender did not take place in a vacuum. Instead, it has fed into all subsequent American wars and smaller military actions. The United States' repeated victories in wars (and the Vietnam War probably would not have dragged on so long were it not to become America's first war defeat) likely has made the United States all the more militaristic and cocksure militarily. 

By now, the United States government thrives on control backed by force, the threat of force, and punishment, not only through military might, but also through an overgrown and overbearing criminal "justice" system of police, laws, money, prosecutors, courts, and prisons;  an overgrown national security system that leaves us little privacy, security, or sufficient liberty; and an overgrown spying and "intelligence" system.

Fortunately, a strong movement continues in favor of civil liberties and government by the governed rather than the reverse. The movement includes the American Civil Liberties Union, fearless and skilled criminal defense and Constitutional lawyers, and the drug legalization movement.

July 4 is meaningless without an ongoing struggle for civil liberties. Now is the time to join that struggle. Jon Katz.

Last February, I wrote of the many beneficial non-violent lessons from the Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Recently, I read the following story about Sun Tzu in Samuel Griffith's Art of War translation from Ssu-Ma Ch'ien's Shih Chi/Historical Records' biographical account of Sun Tzu:

As Griffith translates the account, Ho-lu, the king of Wu, hired Sun Tzu to conduct an experiment in the movement of troops, using a few hundred women, some or all of whom were the king's concubines. After explaining and ordering the women to face right, the women "roared with laughter." Sun Tzu responded: "'If regulations are not clear and orders are thoroughly explained, it is the commander's fault.'" Sun Tzu then repeated and explained the order the same number of times to face right , and the women again broke into laughter.

Sun Tzu responded that when the commander's instructions and commands "'have been made clear, and are not carried out in accordance with military law, it is a crime on the part of the officers.' Then he ordered that the commanders of the right and left ranks be beheaded."

The king rushed over a message that he did not want the executions of his concubines.  Sun Tzu replied: "'Your servant has already receved your appointment as Commander and when the commander is at the head of the army he need not accept all the sovereign's orders.'" On Sun Tzu's orders, the women were executed, and he had no further problems commanding the remaining women.

Perhaps the foregoing account is of questionable reliability, seeing that the account's author asserted that Sun Tzu wrote the Art of War in the sixth century B.C.E., when Griffith estimates the authorship to have been two centuries later, and speaks of questions about whether a group of authors wrote the Art of War, with Sun Tzu having possibly been fictitious.

In any event, either time period of the authorship of the Art of War would have followed the birth of Buddha Shakyamuni (apparently 624 B.C.E.), and might have made Sun Tzu familiar with Lao Tzu and Confucius, who were contemporaries living in the sixth century B.C.E. (if Lao Tzu was in fact a real person).

The foregoing story of Sun Tzu and the executions shows a cold-blooded man, no matter the era, particularly seeing that he was conducting a mere experiment rather than dealing with actual troops for actual battle. The story also highlights the dangerous things that people often do when they decide that the person who has contracted with or hired them has thus given them carte blanche to use any means to reach the goals for which they were hired, regardless of the lack of humanity involved in such means.  

Additionally, although fire may have been a common weapon in the days that Art of War was written , it still is stomach-turning to read the Art of War's twelfth chapter, on using fire to burn opponents in combat: "There are five methods of attacking with fire. The first is to burn personnel; the second, to burn stores; the third, to burn equipment; the fourth, to burn arsenals; and the fifth, to use incendiary missiles."

A few months ago, a t'ai chi teacher asked if I knew local Judge M__________. I did not have much dealings with the judge. The teacher proceeded to tell me that the judge used to practice t'ai chi, but then switched to Aikido, because of the judge's ego, in the teacher's view.

In my sophomore year of college, I joined the tae kwon do/ Korean karate class, taught on campus and at a nearby studio by Master Lee. I wanted to know how better to defend myself against a physical assault; I was too obsessed with all the real and perceived dangers lurking outside, when later I would end up defending many people in court who allegedly caused assaultive danger. Master Lee loved practicing and teaching tae kwon do. He had an infectious sense of humor. He brought to life the love of practicing tae kwon do, including talking to us of a tae kwon do devotee who would even go outside in the snowy dead of winter, and do tae kwon do punching against a tree. After I got my yellow belt -- apparently, all these belt colors are less common if at all in Korea -- I asked him when I would be taught the next form that typically comes with the yellow belt. He was teaching a one-room schoolhouse of sorts with students of all different belt colors. He told me to practice, and I waited until the next class to learn the next form, and waited.

Without talking to Master Lee, I eventually stopped going to class. I had concerns about whether all the kicking in the sport was going to exacerbate previous knee problems. However, I did not simply ask him about it; he probably would have had good suggestions to handle my concerns. My ego probably got in the way, too; I had a yellow belt but was still doing white belt forms, so I thought. I made a mistake.

Eleven years later, I started studying and practicing t'ai chi. I did not feel relaxed and centered enough in my life, and heard that t'ai chi could help. I have stayed with it for over fourteen years. Last October, Master Ben Lo took some time to speak with me during the end-of-morning break on his annual teaching visit to Maryland. He advised me to practice t'ai chi twice daily.

T'ai chi master Wolfe Lowenthal -- who, like Ben Lo, studied with megamaster Cheng Ch'ing -- recounts in his book  Gateway to the Miraculous: Further Explorations in the Tao of Cheng Man Ch'ing, that Cheng Man Ch'ing's teacher Yang Cheng Fu advised practicing the t'ai chi form twice in the morning and twice at night, ultimately totalling seven to eight rounds of practice. Cheng Man Ch'ing's first Western student, Bob Smith, told Lowenthal that Yang Cheng Fu was talking of practicing the t'ai chi long form, which takes twenty to thirty minutes to practice, for a minimum of two hours and twenty minutes of practice each day. That is devotion rising to the level of daily practice of professional athletes. 

Imagine entering the military, risking your life in the line of duty, being treated at a Veterans Administration Hospital, complaining voluntarily about the VA hospital treatment to a reporter after speaking up at a town hall gathering there, and then having VA security stop the interview and strongarm the tape from the reporter. It happened this week at a Washington, D.C.-area Veterans hospital.

Here are links to the story:

WTOP radio reports that the VA is still holding WAMU reporter David Schultz's tape: http://wtop.com/?sid=1647088&nid=25

David Schultz reports: http://wamu.org/audio/nw/09/04/n17090408-25952.asx

WTOP radio's Mark Segraves calls the actions against the reporter and VA patient a crime: http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=695&sid=latest

The federal Reporters Privacy Act: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00002000--aa000-.html

EPIC on the Reporters Privacy Act: http://epic.org/privacy/ppa

Carlos Miller calls for the figurative head of the WAMU newsperson who told the onsite reporter to give up the tape to the cops adn leave: http://carlosmiller.com/2009/04/10/va-officials-seize-reporters-equipment-during-interview-with-veteran

The reporter’s friend speaks: http://blogs.govexec.com/fedblog/2009/04/solidarity_with_david_schultz.php

The Huffington Post speaks out: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/10/reporter-david-schultz-ha_n_185654.html

Mark Segraves reports by audio: http://wtop.com/?sid=1647109&nid=93

Reporters Committee for Free Press speaks out: http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=10702

Reason speaks out: http://reason.com/blog/show/132823.html

President Obama, immediate rectifying action needs to be taken on this urination on the First Amendment.

ADDENDUM: After I posted the foregoing blog entry, WTOP online reported that on the same day, the Department of Veterans Affairs had agreed to return the reporter's tape without conditions for doing so. The tape's return was crucial not only for the interview tha led to its seizure, but because it contained previously-recorded interviews that had no connection to any veterans hospitals. However, this move by the Veterans' Affairs Department is too little too late after the seizure three days beforehand on April 7, 2009, and does nothing to show that any real effort will be made to avoid the repeat of such travesties of justice.

The Department of Veterans Affairs had an opportunity to address this seizure matter on its website, but did not do so.

Last June I blogged about maintaining calm in the eye of the storm. In my view, the deepest calm will come not from becoming a hermit but by learning to be calm in the most otherwise stressful situations, and by continuing to test one's calm in such circumstances.

For fourteen years I have practiced the internal martial art of t'ai chi chuan, which focuses on the strength of calmness, relaxation, and softness, so that instead of expending brute force and muscular energy, one summons, stores, and uses the internal energy of chi/energy/breath. Analogous goals of t'ai chi practice are to be as soft as water so that the opponent has nothing to push against, but to have the devastating strength of a tidal wave; to be as buoyant and yielding as a beach ball in the ocean; and to be as pliable and firmly rooted as a plant being blown by fierce winds without being uprooted.

Fortunately, two groups of local t'ai chi practitioners meet every Saturday morning to start with t'ai chi form practice, followed by push hands practice, both to test one's t'ai chi relaxation and to highlight how truly powerful chi energy can be. The first of these practice locations is at the mini-train station at Cabin John Park in Potomac, Maryland. The second location is at Lincoln Park, eleven blocks east of the United States Capitol. Last weekend I joined the Lincoln Park practitioners for the first time. I am grateful for the other three practitioners' patience in helping me learn push hands -- also known as sensing hands, because the hands are used in hearing the opponent's intentions and moves, and in harmonizing the fighter's situation -- which I had only done twice before, with my previous practice having focused on the t'ai chi form.

At the end of the session, one of the practitioners -- who has been around long enough to have included study with Robert W. Smith, who was the first Western student of t'ai chi master teacher Cheng Man Ch'ing -- told me that he tries to learn at least one new thing every time he practices t'ai chi with others. One of the most beneficial things he taught me was to read Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, and translated by R.F.C. Hull (1953).

Zen in the Art's Herrigel was already deeply interested in mysticism when invited to teach philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He then set out to learn about mysticism through Zen Buddhism. Herrigel was rebuffed in his efforts to find a Zen teacher, and instead was told "that it was quite hopeless for a European to attempt to penetrate into this realm of spiritual life -- perhaps the strangest which the Far East has to offer -- unless he began by learning one of the Japanese arts associated with Zen. Herrigel could have chosen Japanese painting or flower design as such a Japanese art. Instead, he chose the physically demanding art of archery, which involves the use of a bow that requires tremendous physical strength and endurance ... until one learns to become one with the bow, arrow, and target, and to relax through focusing on one's breath. Herrigel diligently studied for several years under his master until he could achieve such muscular and internal effortlessness in pursuing the spiritual art of archery.

Herrigel wrote the following about martial arts weapons fighting: "One of the personal guards of the Shogun one day came to Tajima−no-kami wishing to be trained in fencing. The master said: 'As I observe, you seem to be a master of fencing yourself. Pray tell me to what school you belong, before we enter into the relationship of teacher and pupil.' The guardsman said, 'I am ashamed to confess that I have never learned the art.' 'Are you trying to fool me? I am teacher to the honorable Shogun himself, and I know my judging eye never fails.' 'I am sorry to defy your honour, but I really know nothing.'

"This resolute denial on the part of the visitor made the swordsmaster think for a while, and he finally said, 'If you say so, it must be so; but still I am sure you are a master of something, though I do not know of what.' 'If you insist, I will tell you. There is one thing of which I can say I am complete master. When I was still a boy, the thought came upon me that as a Samurai I ought in no circumstances to be afraid of death, and I have grappled with the problem of death now for some years, and finally the problem of death ceased to worry me. May this be at what you hint?' 'Exactly!' exclaimed Tajima−no−kami. 'That is what I mean. I am glad that I made no mistake in my judgment. For the ultimate secrets of swordsmanship also lie in being released from the thought of death. I have trained ever so many hundreds of my pupils along this line, but so far none of them really deserve the final certificate for swordsmanship. You need no technical training, you are already a master.'"

It is curious that Buddhism focuses so heavily on peace, but at the same time has been summoned in bloody battle for the benefit of those including masters at archery. Herrigel taught in Japan from 1924 to 1929, between World Wars I and II. He returned to Germany working at Erlangen University, retiring in 1951 and passing in 1955. My initial skimming of Zen in the Art reveals no mention of World War II nor of the horrors of Hitler and his followers. Herrigel was born in 1884, which distanced him from being forced into work for Hitler and his cause. However, with Zen focused so much on peace, it will feel strange indeed if I find not a word in his book about Hitler's horrors and the rampant atrocities of the Japanese military in World War II.

Returning to the theme of power and skill through fearlessness of death, such fearlessness seems to be a familiar focus both to Buddhism and Hinduism. The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh teach lessons on being fearless of death. Ram Dass -- who was influenced substantially by Hinduism in India even though he has said that he sought out Buddhism there -- does the same.