Law


Nullify the Drug War

In an essay in Time magazine 4 of the writers of The Wire commit:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

One of the writers, Dennis Lehane, was interviewed today on NPR by Scott Simon. It is well worth the 4 minutes.
Here is one of the exchanges:

SS: Some of the most articulate and passionate proponents of drugs laws and, in fact, fierce and aggressive police action to enforce the drug laws are people who live in inner city communities…who say drugs have ravaged our neighborhood. They’ve taken almost half of an entire generation from us. We have to stamp this out.
DL: There is absolutely no way I can argue against that argument. I am not argueing for mass legalization of drugs. I’m argueing for a different, more common sense approach to the drug war, if you will. And, saying, I don’t believe that the drug war as it is being fought now is working is working.

Since Dennis won’t argue let me, in radio sound bite form, do it for him.
The drug war is the monster that has ravaged your neighborhoods. End it and you will be able to reclaim your neighborhoods. To end it you must hold accountable the stakeholders in the drug war: the politicians, the DEA, the police departments and prison industry whose livelihoods depend on ravaging your neighborhood. The blood is on their hands.
If the drugs had been available in the corner drug store like beer or the liquor store like Jack Daniels you would not have lost half of an entire generation. Yes, prohibition must end; there must be mass legalization.
Would folks still use and abuse drugs? Sure. Just like folks, including most of the drug war stakeholders, use and abuse alcohol.
What you would not have is drug war related brutality in your neighborhoods, 1 in 15 of your young men in penal institutions, or drug gang related mayhem throughout much of the world.

Take one small step to End it now! Vote to acquit when there is no violence involved.

On a related note see these posts on jury nullification by Radley Balko.

I’d certainly do this. If only I’d get called to jury duty. I’ve been around long enough that you’d think it would happen, but no. In the meantime Mrs Modulator has been called many times.


Attorney Gone Wild

I guess this goes in the category of if you don’t ask for it you for sure won’t get it:

…Gary — who calls himself ”the Brioni man” because he favors the Italian designer’s suits — is asking Circuit Court Judge Leroy Moe to approve at least $11,000 an hour, for a total of $24.3 million.
…..
Gary’s proposed $11,000 hourly fee, for 2,211.5 hours of work, is 11 times more than any other lawyer on the case is seeking. Manuel Socias, Gary’s co-lead counsel, billed 2,920 hours at a rate of $1,000 an hour. Paul Finizio, of Finizio & Finizio in Fort Lauderdale, billed 1,743 hours at $750 an hour.
Gary took the case after SPS agreed to pay him an undisclosed portion of any award, or a contingency fee. He says he deserves more because he was in effect financing a case that might bring him nothing.
Had he won, Gary would have gotten $3.3 billion at a standard contingency-fee rate. That’s $1.5 million an hour.

Let’s be glad that he did not win! Even $1,000 an hour seems pretty damned high to me.
As far as a return on his investment something equal to 10-20%/year should be quite equitable. Let’s see, at a $1000/hour 20% would work out to around $400,000. Oh wait, he didn’t even put in a full year’s time.


Incarcerated Without Charges

Most folks, with the notable exception of the bush administration, think it is wrong to incarcerate someone without filing legitimate criminal charges against them. It turns out that there may be others:

County health authorities obtained a court order to lock him up as a danger to the public because he failed to take precautions to avoid infecting others. Specifically, he said he did not heed doctors’ instructions to wear a mask in public.

Radly Balko asks what we should make of a case where it appears that just such an injustice may have occurred:

Now this guy softened the hard question a bit by refusing to take what I’d say were relatively unobtrusive precautionary measures. But I’m curious, what do H&R readers make of the collision of individual rights and the state’s arguable (I’d say convincing) duty to protect us from highly-communicable, untreatable fatal diseases?

The idea that someone who’s done nothing wrong could be condemned to an isolation cell for the remainder of his life is pretty horrifying.

Nothing wrong? The guy has a drug resistant strain of tuberculosis and apparently will not take precautions to protect others from the disease.

His behavior appears to fall into a category like attempted assault, reckless endangerment, etc. If so, charge him, prosecute him and incarcerate him.

There needs to be a set of court vetted rules of law that apply in cases like this and due process needs to apply.

Once convicted and incarcerated then the normal rules of incarceration for this type of behavior need to apply. This may be a bit unacceptable:

He said sheriff’s deputies will not let him take a shower — he cleans himself with wet wipes — and have taken away his television, radio, personal phone and computer.

There is no reason to provide convicted felons televisions, phones, radios or computers. But this guy is not a convicted felon and there should likely be different rules in this type of public health case.

Access basic hygiene should be mandatory.


Toss gonzalez Out Along With Some Other Detritus

In his exposition on how alberto gonzalez has made a mountain out of his own mole hill Charles Krauthammer explains why the executive branch might set enforcement priorities for its U.S. attorneys:

But the fact is that there are thousands of laws on the books and only finite resources for any prosecutor to deploy, which means that one must have priorities about which laws to emphasize and which crimes to preferentially pursue.
Those decisions are essentially political. And they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities.

Herein lies one of the real problems of 21st century America. We do not live under the rule of law but of legislation pretending to be law. Laws to be meaningful must be knowable by and understandable to those who must follow them.
With thousands, hell-likely 10s of thousands of laws on the federal, state and local books we can hardly know them all. As to understanding them, pshaw…
Yes, gonzalez should step down.
Congress, though, would do better by us if it spent its time this session and in future sessions eliminating legislation and rewriting what must be kept until such time as the federal code is readable by and understandable to the average citizen.
When these and a few other conditions have been met* we may be able to say that we live under the rule of law. Yes, lawyers will still be needed but large numbers of them will be able to move on to productive work.

*See Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty, 84-107.