Idiot Liar and Extremely White Defense Attorney Douglas D. Ford Blames “white face jury” For His Client’s Violent Carjacking in an Op-Ed in (where else) the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Of course this was in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  They titled it: A City’s Haunting Rejection of a Child.   They’re literally jealous of big cities like NYC and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cincinnati (does the L.A. Times even still exist?) for one-upping them on rising crime numbers — and — celebrating government enforced criminality.  So they resort to the lamest and most dishonest screed the’ve published in a while about our Haunting Rejection of a Child.  Except the child is a 15ish (their term) violent carjacker who put his victim in the hospital as he beat her and stole her car.

She is the most selfless of humans: a nurse.

The defense attorney, one very excited Douglas D. Ford, writes a Dickensian tale of a young boy forced into crime by social discomfort who, instead of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his siblings, spontaneously decides to carjack a nurse, beating her into the hospital in the process, except, according to Ford, he didn’t mean it: he just felt uncomfortable in a suburb outside the city which forced him to first try to steal a purse then violently carjack the nurse.  Of course, none of this is true.  I don’t believe for a moment that even Douglas D. Ford believes it: he just wanted to virtue signal to get new clients.

Douglas D. Ford, Defense Attorney, Idiot, Exploiter, Narcissist.

Very admirably, the nurse forgave her offender in court.  That’s decent of her, and I have no doubt she was sincere, but it doesn’t mitigate the fact that it takes years for thugs like this to ramp up to beating and carjacking people.  This little so-and-so has probably been committing increasingly violent crimes for years, likely on his own family and community first.  That’s the way it goes.

But not according to Magical Unicorn Defense Attorney Douglas D. Ford.  You see, Ford thinks it is our fault that his client had to carjack the nurse, and he says it loud and proud in the increasingly pathetic Atlanta-Journal Constitution.  You know when an elevator falls 50 stories and explodes?  Neither do I.  But I imagine it’s a good metaphor for whatever joke of an editorial staff (the woke ghost of Jay Bookman?) vetted this racist garbage.

I sent the following letter to Douglas Ford.  No word back yet, but I’ll update the post if he has the integrity to respond to the specific accusations about his instances of lying:

Being an attorney, you know that while it’s very kind when a victim is compassionate to her offender, she is a mere witness and the trial is about the crime.

And you blithely lied and attempted clumsily to deflect blame on others for every aspect of this crime.  If the Bar had an award for worst lying, I’d certainly nominate you for it.

Your client had multiple opportunities through literally hundreds of school programs and agencies, despite his family’s problems.  Instead, he chose to steal a car (as a 15-year old, there was no other way to obtain a car), drive it with no license, endanger countless other drivers, and carjack and assault a woman so brutally she was hospitalized.

Over the 20 years when I lived and worked with youth, women, and deprived children in Southeast Atlanta, I provided services to many youths such as your client, almost always pro bono or at poverty level wages.  I know these interventions exist, and you know they exist: you are a liar to deny it.

Let’s review your article.  You sleazily try to obscure his actions by projecting them, with no evidence but your own warped ideology, on the residents of the community he terrorized.  And by using passive speech to describe the attack, you insinuate (not convincingly) that the victim was just brutalized by nobody in particular, as opposed to your client, who is not a meterological event but a person, and who could have killed her.

You then dog whistle that he was “out of his element” by being in an “outlying county.”  Frankly, it sounds as if he was smack center of his element: robbing and brutalizing strangers.  You likely have access to his juvenile record, though we don’t.  I cannot believe this was his first crime.  And even if it wasn’t the first time he was caught, you know your narrative about his motives is an abject lie.

Also, exactly what do you mean by “out of his element”?  Do your harbor prejudice towards the residents of the community he terrorized?  If so, which specific prejudice?  You opened this door in a public forum: I’d like to walk through it with a Bar complaint about your bias.  If you’re going to hold an entire, multicultural, innocent community on trial for the actions of your client, there should be consequences for you, as we now have a new legal system in which certain verbal slurs are crimes.

Let’s see what happens if we challenge your hatreds.

Your description of the crime itself belies belief.  As you know, there are limits in court, even for defense attorneys, to lie for their clients.  You claim that this youth was merely impulsive about robbing a car, when it is clear that he was seeking victims; you claim that he was merely seeking to steal the victim’s purse upon entering the car; you claim that merely on impulse and fear from being in an outlying suburb, he then felt pressured to carjack his victim, and when the victim fought back, he beat her so severely that she was hospitalized.  As you observe, they are of the same race.

Why do you even observe that?  If the victim was white, then what would you say?  Real question.

You write: ” impulsively, [your client] decided to jump into the driver’s seat and take the car too.  The woman noticed him and, in trying to stop him, sustained injuries to her eyes and arms when thrown across the pavement.”

Let me paraphrase: your thug client threw an innocent victim out of a car, beat her down, and perhaps tried to run her over while carjacking her.  Or maybe he just punched her in the face.  She certainly didn’t sustain those injuries by being blown across the parking lot by meteorological forces, right?

You continue: “[your client] made it down to an inner city street, where, after a brief police pursuit, he flipped the stolen car with four other children, the ones he wanted to impress.”

To rewrite this honestly: he and his criminal cohorts left the victim bleeding on the pavement, piled into her car, endangered even more drivers and police, and then your client could have killed his four criminal compatriots by flipping the car.  I bet Atlanta didn’t even bother to prosecute the other four hardened, if youthful, criminals.

The rest of your op-ed is a grotesque, humiliating combination of making excuses for your client, praising your own special insight to the point of reader nausea, and carrying on about how the offender’s grandmother had to make “long trips” to attend court.  Buddy, I took the MARTA/Cobb County rapid transit for a month to go to one social service job assisting poor people as I was recovering from back surgery.  The trip was three hours each way only because I had to get from one suburb to another suburb in another city.  Otherwise, it would have been about 45 minutes from Marietta (I assume this is the county to which you refer, though the same is true of every other exurb) to downtown Atlanta, where you suggest the offender lives.

That’s no burden on his grandmother.  People of all races with jobs do it every day to support freeloaders like this little thug.

You then racistly blame “white faces” for convicting your client.  Who, thanks to court leniency, will be out, free to stalk and beat other victims in about four years.  White faces, eh?  Here comes the Bar complaint.  My parents and brother lived in Cobb County  until they died.  Not one of them would take race into account if they were called as jurors.  You need to apologize to the good white and other people you have smeared with racism in Cobb County.

You need to apologize to my family.  And you need to confront your racism.  If you have trouble doing that, I am available to help you with a Bar complaint, which I am drafting now.

Unlike me, you make tidy money and even better benefits exploiting the crimes committed by a vanishing small fraction of deprived children, as you smear the rest of these children, and all white people, in the process.  Unlike you, I try to help deprived youth only out of a sense of compassion.  I still do.

But what I have learned from decades of doing this is that the worst thing you can do for a youth like this is to tell him he’s the real victim.  It is you and people like you in the Criminal Bar — not the schools, not the courts, not the prisons, that endow young violent criminals like this one with a sense of privilege to rob and assault and murder others — and to give you an opportunity to preen about your moral superiority.  What a small, unreflective, and dishonest man you are.

Your behavior is a self-serving sickness that literally destroys offenders’ communities and the offenders themselves. [some grammar corrected]