Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart was the featured lunchtime speaker Friday at the annual meeting of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ( NACDL) in Denver. He was introduced by his former campaign manager, criminal defense lawyer Hal Haddon (currently most widely known as Kobe Bryant's defense attorney.) We had the pleasure of sitting next to them during lunch.

When it came time to speak to the assembled group of 450 lawyers, among other things, Sen. Hart spoke about the terrorist threat. As he has said before, he believes the question of the next attack is not one of "if" but "when." He believes it is likely to be one involving biological or chemical weapons, most likely something like smallpox, in a place like Denver, Kansas City or Dallas--in other words, in the heartland and not necessarily in a major city. He also spoke of the need to to balance security and the threat to civil liberties. He said that under Bush, we have placed all decison making authority in the civil liberties arena in the hands of the one man who most shouldn't have it--Attorney General John Ashcroft. As you can imagine, his comment was met by thunderous applause.

As regular readers of this site know, we were an early Hart supporter when he considered running for President earlier this year. We hope still that if the Democrats win in 2004, Hart will be appointed Secretary of State. We asked him some questions during lunch, prior to his speech, such as whether he had a preference for any one of the current candidates. He does not.

While we will support Howard Dean if he gets the nomination, some of Dean's positions on criminal justice issues, particularly the death penalty, concern us. While we now know Dean and some of the other candidates' positions on the death penalty, today we realized we had never asked Sen. Hart directly for his position on the death penalty. So we asked him while sitting at lunch today, again, prior to his speech. His response was: "I'm against it. I've always been against it. I voted against it."

That makes us even sorrier he's not running.