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Welcome/Contact Me!

Welcome to my author site.   Here, you’ll find information about my published work (including where to buy it), my blog posts and the latest 411 on what I’ve got in the pipeline.

If you’re in need of a criminal defense attorney, please visit my attorney site.

If you’re an editor who would like to speak with me regarding a commissioned article or other work, please email me at christina@diedoardolaw.com.

Thanks and again, welcome!

—Christina

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“Resist” Column for Oct. 19 is up

Check out this week’s “Resist” column in the Bay Area Reporter, which explains how lawyers for the family of Kayla Moore, who died in 2013 while in the custody of the Berkeley Police Department, are going to trial under the Americans with Disabilities Act, rather than under more traditional Sec. 1983 claims.

If the strategy works, it could open up new ways for other survivors of police violence or their families (many of whom, according to some studies, probably qualify for ADA protection like Ms. Moore did) to recover damages despite the efforts of SCOTUS and the 9th Cir. to sue the cops.

–CAD

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On The DOJ Abandoning The Rule of Law for the Rule of Imaginary Friends

Friday’s memo by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on “religious freedom” is reprehensible on its face (and potentially unconstitutional depending on how it’s implemented, particularly given Sessions’ acts to gut efforts to enforce Title VII against those who discriminate against queer and/or Trans persons).

However, as a criminal defense attorney, I do find it darkly amusing that a former head of the FBI like Sessions has apparently overlooked the Pandora’s Box he opened with this quip:  “Except in the narrowest of circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law.”

Really?

In that case, what’s to stop some forward-thinking criminal defense attorney like me from creating the “Church of Chaos”, which has, as part of its general Discordian philosophy, posits that breaking laws is a religious obligation?  What prevents congregants from asserting that belief as an affirmative defense in a federal criminal case?

Given that the memo (on p.4, para 12) also asserts that the federal government may not “second-guess the reasonableness of a religious belief” apparently not much from DOJ’s perspective, at least outside of the tax evasion context.

If this seems fanciful, remember, we live in a country where in forty-eight states (i.e. all but California and Illinois, where it is banned by statute) someone can assault, batter or murder a Trans woman like me and then assert the “Trans panic” defense–i.e. “I discovered she was Trans, so of course I had to attack/beat/murder her!”—and mitigate the consequences of their violent act partially or completely if the jury buys it.

Those defenses exist not only because of the transmisogyny ingrained in our society but because of a coordinated effort by the GOP and other Christian Dominionists to weaken (and ultimately, replace) the rule of secular law with the rule of “What my imaginary friend told me.”  In that context, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see a near future where those with privilege (rich, white, cis people) will be even less accountable for their bad acts than they are today, so long as they can claim to be acting from “faith”.

—CAD

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“Resist” Column for 9/7/2017 is up!

I’m particularly proud of this one, as I get to tell the story of the Battle of San Francisco and the Fourth Battle of Berkeley.  Only thing better than a Bay Bridge Series is one where two great cities and Antifa win—and the Fash lose. 🙂

–CAD