Smoke em if you got em

It's fascinating to watch the various governing bodies and the sports media fall all over themselves in reporting Phelps' apology for "inappropriate behavior." Would be even more fascinating if anyone noted that, yes, you can win eight gold medals in Olympic swimming and still like to smoke pot.

Illegal evergreen growing

This is...how do they say it on the internets?...oh yeah...Teh Awesome.

KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.

The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.

Go watch the video showing the cops discovering the stash. They're chuckling about it. It will be interesting to see what probable cause they gave for the search warrant and how they identified the house in the first place. They may not be chuckling for long.

And, why Odessa, you might ask.

Cooper chose the Odessa police department for baiting because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She's currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.

Hopefully, privacy laws in TX don't make it illegal to videotape the police.

Drug czar

Hoping that an Obama administration would roll-back or even just make more sensible the Drug War, is not looking so good, especially in light of Eric Holder's pick to be the AG.

Barry McCaffrey's greed and dishonesty

What got left out of the disgusting report of McCaffrey's ability to go on NBC as an "analyst" and promote wars and weapons systems that he profits from, was his role as "Drug Czar" during the Clinton era. It would be fascinating to see how much his current and past employers have benefited from our disastrous efforts at prohibition.

No end to the war

The Drug War, that is, unless Eric Holder, Obama's pick for AG, has changed his views on drug sentencing.

Barack Obama's selection of Eric Holder as his attorney general is a very discouraging sign for anyone who hoped the new administration would de-escalate the war on drugs. As Dave Weigel noted earlier today, Holder pushed for stiffer marijuana penalties when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and the details are strikingly at odds not only with Obama's signals regarding marijuana but with his opposition to long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. According to a December 1996 report in The Washington Times excerpted at TalkLeft, Holder wanted "minimum sentences of 18 months for first-time convicted drug dealers, 36 months for the second time and 72 months for every conviction thereafter." He also wanted to "make the penalty for distribution and possession with intent to distribute marijuana a felony, punishable with up to a five-year sentence." The D.C. Council made the latter Holder-endorsed change in 2000. Holder thought New York City's irrational, unjust crackdown on pot smokers was a fine idea and worth emulating, saying "we have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important." His rhetoric on the seriousness of marijuana offenses was indistinguishable from that of the most zealous Republican drug warrior:

The truth of the matter is that marijuana is a significant problem for the city....Crack cocaine still drives most of the violence in this city, but marijuana violence is increasing. We need to nip it in the bud.

And as Ta-Nihisi Coates writes, the "controversy" Senators will look at during the nomination process will be Holder's role in the Marc Rich pardon and not a mention about the absurdity of our non-violent drug laws.

A piece of the action?

Amateurs join the fun in the War on Drugs.

When residents first began noticing Mr. Jakob, he certainly looked the part. His hair was chopped short, residents recalled, and his stocky chest filled a black T-shirt he sometimes wore that read “Police.” They said he wore military-style boots, pants with pockets running down the legs and carried a badge (his lawyer said it was from a former job as a security guard in St. Louis). And his off-white Ford Crown Victoria was decked out with police radios and internal flashing lights, residents said.

He first came to town in January, his lawyer said, to meet Chief McCrary, whose experiences serving in Afghanistan Mr. Jakob had read about in a local newspaper. Mr. Jakob was considering contract work overseas, Mr. Schwartz said, and the pair hit it off.

Soon, the arrests began. Some of those whose homes were searched said they had been kicked in the head and had had shotguns held against them. Mr. Jakob, many said, seemed to be leading the crew of Gerald police officers.

“He was definitely in charge — it was all him,” said Mike Withington, 49, a concrete finisher, who said Mr. Jakob pounded on his door in May, waking him up and yanking him, in handcuffs, out onto his front yard.

Mr. Withington said he had not yet been charged with a crime; Gary Toelke, the Franklin County sheriff, confirmed that no local charges had been issued against him. But the mortification of that day, Mr. Withington said, has kept him largely indoors and led him to consider moving. Since the search, residents have tossed garbage and crumpled boxes of Sudafed (which has an ingredient that can be used to make methamphetamine) on his lawn, he said, and he no longer shops in town, instead driving miles to neighboring towns.

Turns out Mr. Jakob was a security guard from a town down the road.

Federales

This is insane on a number of levels.

The owner of six Los Angeles-area medical marijuana dispensaries and his wife were arrested by federal agents early today following an investigation sparked by a traffic accident in which a man allegedly high on one of the dispensaries' products plowed into a parked car on the shoulder of the 101 Freeway, killing the driver of the vehicle and paralyzing a CHP officer.

Virgil and Psytra Grant, the proprietors of the clinics, are facing a host of federal charges, including operating dispensaries within 1,000 feet of schools and churches. The pair are expected to appear before a judge later this afternoon in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Authorities are seeking a third defendant, who allegedly sold a pound of marijuana out of the back door of one of the clinics.

The war on medical marijuana can't get more insane, and if I was a bar owner, I'd be watching this case very closely.

Just like Gonzalez, but without the shame

AG Mukasey, who isn't sure torture is illegal, does know that fixing our drug laws will unleash waves of pure evil across the "homeland."

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey warned Congress on Thursday that unless it enacted legislation quickly, hundreds of people in jail for cocaine offenses, “many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into the community nationwide.”

But as Mr. Mukasey delivered the message to the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing, he found himself upbraided and criticized by members who said he was vastly overstating the situation.

Democrats noted that no one would be released from jail without a hearing before a federal judge who would be obliged to evaluate each case in consultation with the authorities.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said Mr. Mukasey was squandering his credibility by raising the fear that many violent offenders would soon be released.

Ms. Waters said his statement was misleading and added that the last attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, was forced to resign over a lack of credibility.

Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York who succeeded Mr. Gonzales, did not dispute that there was a process in place that relied on federal judges to decide who could be released.

At issue is a ruling by the United States Sentencing Commission that, beginning March 3, defendants convicted of crack cocaine offenses be sentenced under new guidelines with lesser penalties. The commission also said that the new guidelines would be applied retroactively. Those actions were part of the continuing debate over how to narrow differences in sentences for crack and powder cocaine.

The commission issued its plan immediately after the Supreme Court ruled in December that federal judges may hand down lighter sentences for crack cocaine defendants than those recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the committee’s ranking Republican, has introduced legislation that would eliminate the commission’s plan to make the new guidelines for crack cocaine sentences retroactive. Both Democrats and Republicans said there was no expectation that the legislation would be enacted.

Football and the WOD

Lawrence Tynes, who after missing two field goals in the final minutes of regulation last week was very nearly told to make his own travel plans home, only to be redeemed in overtime, has bigger things on his mind.

May 5, 2003, was Tynes’s 25th birthday. With plans to celebrate that night, he drove toward Mark’s house. He did not see his brother.

“There were Suburbans and bags and vans and people in and out of his place,” Tynes said. “And I said, ‘Oh, wow.’ I turned around and went home.”

He was not entirely surprised. Federal agents had simultaneously raided three homes. Among those arrested were Mark Tynes and four of Lawrence Tynes’s best friends — friends from the neighborhood “that I grew up with,” Tynes said.

Mark Tynes was pinned as the leader of an extensive operation that authorities said moved 3,600 pounds of marijuana from Texas to Florida over several years.

“If they would have said 10 years,” Lawrence Tynes said of his brother’s sentence, “I would have said, You know what? You deserve it. It’s tough love. I mean, you do the crime, you do the time.”

But Mark Tynes had a record, including felony convictions for possession. And he “paid a heavy penalty for refusing to cooperate,” a managing assistant United States attorney told The Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal after sentencing. The others cooperated fully. They became government witnesses. Lawrence Tynes watched as each testified against his brother.

“To me, they were all just as guilty as one another, because they were all doing it,” Tynes said.

Tynes should reserve his outrage for prosecutors who gave his brother 10 years for a non-violent crime, not the friends who were given a choice -- his brother or their life.

Drug war intransigence

It's not the judges, it's Congress.

There was an avalanche of sentencing news last week. The Supreme Court gave trial judges more power to show mercy, the United States Sentencing Commission gave almost 20,000 prisoners doing time on crack cocaine charges a good shot at early release, and even President Bush commuted a crack sentence.

The net effect: tinkering.

The United States justice system remains, by international standards at least, exceptionally punitive. And nothing that happened last week will change that.

Even the sentencing commission’s striking move on Tuesday, meant to address the wildly disproportionate punishments for crack and powder cocaine, will have only a minor impact. Unless Congress acts, many thousands of defendants will continue to face vastly different sentences for possessing and selling different types of the same thing.

Worth reading the whole thing...Liptak Mondays...

Decriminalize

It seems like every day, Senator Dodd says something to impress me.

Obama on crack

Via Bean, who share's Darrick Jackson's disappointment that Obama is reluctant to take a stand on reducing the disparity in sentencing for selling rock versus powder cocaine.

IT IS UNCLEAR if Barack Obama's caution precedes consensus or cave-in. Asked if he would eliminate discriminatory laws that punish crack cocaine possession so heavily that it would take 100 times more in powder cocaine for the same sentence, Obama started off by saying the law was a mistake. He talked about his record in the Illinois Senate.

"I want to point out that I fought provisions like this and in many cases voted against provisions like this, knowing the way they could be exploited politically," Obama told the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists last week after addressing the National Association of Black Journalists. "I thought it was the right thing to do. Even though the politics of it was tough back in the '90s, as a state legislator I took some tough votes to make sure we didn't see the perpetration of these kinds of unjust laws."

[...]

A Tribune profile this spring on Obama found vacillation on what anecdotes merit capital punishment. He opposed expanding the death penalty for "gang activity" murders, saying it would serve as a "mechanism to target particular neighborhoods." But he voted to strengthen the penalty for particularly gruesome killings of elders or the physically or mentally challenged.

That vacillation became evident as he kept talking about crack-vs.-powder sentencing, which has come to symbolize racial injustice in criminal justice. He said that if he were to become president, he would support a commission to issue a report "that allows me to say that based on the expert evidence, this is not working and it's unfair and unjust. Then I would move legislation forward."

That was a puzzling statement because the US Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984, has long said the system is not working and reaffirmed in April that the 100-to-1 ratio "significantly undermines" sentencing reform.

Obama asked if he could make a "broader" point. "Even if we fix this, if it was a 1-to-1 ratio, it's still a problem that folks are selling crack. It's still a problem that our young men are in a situation where they believe the only recourse for them is the drug trade. So there is a balancing act that has to be done in terms of, do we want to spend all our political capital on a very difficult issue that doesn't get at some of the underlying issues; whether we want to spend more of that political capital getting early childhood education in place, getting after-school programs in place, getting summer school programs in place."

Obama claimed, "I'm not suggesting it's an either/or but I'm suggesting that an even higher priority for me is getting young men and increasingly young women to stop getting involved in the drug trade in the first place. And that's going to require pretty heavy lifting. That's going to require some billions of dollars of expenditure that aren't there right now."

By asking an open question about spending "all our political capital" on eliminating the 100-to-1 ratio, that raises the possibility he will spend little or none on it. By talking about a "broader" prescription of early childhood school programs -- which means nothing to a 17-year-old in jail-- Obama risks flashing a losing card of being nonconfrontational.

I'm not so sure I share that view. For one thing, why is Obama being held to this higher standard? Because of his background, his acknowledged past use, or his racial identity? Are the same questions being put to Hillary? To Giuliani? To Romney? Almost certainly not.

And while the War on Drugs was -- until the war in Iraq came along -- one of the costliest, most misguided, and counterproductive efforts this country has been engaged in since the Vietnam War (I'm sensing a pattern there), openly opposing it isn't going to motivate any voters who aren't already supportive of a candidate's overall positions. And crack/powder sentencing disparity probably isn't on most voter's hot list of issues. It's not on mine, and I actually care about the issue (though I'm more interested in overall changes in how all non-violent drug crimes are handled and in federal sentencing guidelines in general).

As an aside, does anyone even smoke crack cocaine anymore?

But I digress. On the contrary, taking a stand will almost certainly end up being used by his opponents as a hammer to bash him over the head. I can hear Clinton claiming he's deaf to the problems of the inner city while the Republicans will show lurid commercials featuring the latest "Willie Horton" to engage the lizard brains of their base voters.

Obama's right to tread lightly there.

I am disappointed that in the current naive and hypocritical age in which we live, an open discussion of the effects of the War on Drugs on our society and globally is simply impossible among "serious" candidates for office.

The lonesome death of Kathryn Johnston

The war on drugs and old women continues.

Gregg Junnier and another narcotics officer went inside the apartments around 2 p.m. while Jason Smith checked the woods. Smith found dozens of bags of marijuana — in baggies that were clear, blue or various other colors and packaged to sell. With no one connected to the pot, Smith stashed the bags in the trunk of the patrol car. A use was found for Smith's stash 90 minutes later: A phone tip led the three officers to a man in a "gold-colored jacket" who might be dealing. The man, identified as X in the documents but known as Fabian Sheats, spotted the cops and put something in his mouth. They found no drugs on Sheats, but came up with a use for the pot they found earlier.

They wanted information or they would arrest Sheats for dealing.

While Junnier called for a drug-sniffing dog, Smith planted some bags under a rock, which the K-9 unit found.

But if Sheats gave them something, he could walk.

Sheats pointed out 933 Neal St., the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. That, he claimed, is where he spotted a kilogram of cocaine when he was there to buy crack from a man named "Sam."

They needed someone to go inside, but Sheats would not do for their purposes because he was not a certified confidential informant.

So about 5:05 p.m. they reached out by telephone to Alex White to make an undercover buy for them. They had experience with White and he had proved to be a reliable snitch.

But White had no transportation and could not help.

Still, Smith, Junnier and the other officer, Arthur Tesler, according to the state's case, ran with the information. They fabricated all the right answers to persuade a magistrate to give them a no-knock search warrant.

By 6 p.m., they had the legal document they needed to break into Kathryn Johnston's house, and within 40 minutes they were prying off the burglar bars and using a ram to burst through the elderly woman's front door. It took about two minutes to get inside, which gave Johnston time to retrieve her rusty .38 revolver.

Tesler was at the back door when Junnier, Smith and the other narcotics officers crashed through the front.

Johnston got off one shot, the bullet missing her target and hitting a porch roof. The three narcotics officers answered with 39 bullets.

Five or six bullets hit the terrified woman. Authorities never figured out who fired the fatal bullet, the one that hit Johnston in the chest. Some pieces of the other bullets — friendly fire — hit Junnier and two other cops.

The officers handcuffed the mortally wounded woman and searched the house.

There was no Sam.

There were no drugs.

There were no cameras that the officers had claimed was the reason for the no-knock warrant.

Just Johnston, handcuffed and bleeding on her living room floor.

That is when the officers took it to another level. Three baggies of marijuana were retrieved from the trunk of the car and planted in Johnston's basement. The rest of the pot from the trunk was dropped down a sewage drain and disappeared.

The three began getting their stories straight.

Two of the cops, Junnier and Smith, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter yesterday.

Atlanta's police commissioner claimed afterwards, that "justice was served."

Only as far as the two cops' blatant misconduct and brutality goes. It does not address the climate in which the law feels justified in condoning no-knock searches based on the coerced assertions of an informant. It does not begin to address a crusade in which this type of behavior is condoned when someone less obviously innocent that a 92-year old woman dies.

Asked how widespread such practices might be, Mr. Nahmias said investigators were looking at narcotics officers, officers who had once served in the narcotics unit and “officers that had never been in that unit but may have adopted that practice.”

The investigation has already led to scrutiny of criminal cases involving the indicted officers and others who may have used similar tactics. Paul Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, said his office was reviewing at least 100 cases involving the three officers, including 10 in which defendants were in jail.

If they continue to cooperate, Mr. Junnier, who retired after the shooting, faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and Mr. Smith, who resigned Thursday, faces 12 years.

The third officer, Arthur Tesler, declined a plea deal. He was indicted on charges of violation of oath by a public officer, making false statements and false imprisonment under color of legal process.

Mr. Tesler’s lawyer, John Garland, said his client was following his training when he put false claims in an affidavit.

Mr. Nahmias took a moment to dwell on what he said was the unusual nature of the officers’ offenses.

“The officers charged today were not corrupt in the sense that we have seen before,” he said. “They are not accused of seeking payoffs or trying to rob drug dealers or trying to protect gang members. Their goal was to arrest drug dealers and seize illegal drugs, and that’s what we want our police officers to do for our community.

“But these officers pursued that goal by corrupting the justice system, because when it was hard to do their job the way the Constitution requires, they let the ends justify their means.”

Mr. Nahmias said the statement in the plea agreement that officers cut corners in order to “be considered productive officers and to meet A.P.D.’s performance targets” reflected their perception of the department’s expectations.