Last night's ACLU Membership Conference gala titled "Celebrating Liberty" — stepped it up a notch, from just plain inspiring to outright rousing. Although Ozomatli concluded the night by whipping the gathering into a frenzy, for me the greatest thrill was witnessing the innovative philanthropist and political activist George Soros speak about his personal history and convictions.
If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil — or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches — you can take relief in yesterday's ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.
Gradually, it is becoming common knowledge that even though a white American is just as likely to use or sell drugs, if you're African-American, you are many times more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for a drug law violation.
The new report by Mona Lynch, Ph.D., "Selective Enforcement of Drug Laws in Cuyahoga County, Ohio: A Report on the Racial Effects of Geographic Disparities in Arrest Patterns" – published in January by Citizens for a Safe & Fair Cleveland (CSFC) and made public for the first time last week – lays bare the intricacies of how this dynamic has taken shape in Cleveland's criminal justice system.
Preliminary research indicates that up to 80 percent of all drug cases in America may be based on information provided by informants. Informants work for the government, often secretly, to gather and provide information or to testify in exchange for cash or leniency in punishment for their own crimes. In many courts across the nation, all it takes is the uncorroborated word of an informant to charge someone with a crime.
This week has featured a few encouraging developments for those of us advocating reforms in the ways law enforcement works with informants:
Flanked by fellow legislators and drug policy reform leaders, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) held a press conference yesterday in his office on Capitol Hill to announce the details of legislation that would eliminate federal criminal sanctions for possession of marijuana.
The “Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008,” also known as H.R. 5843, would remove federal criminal penalties for personal possession of up to 100 grams of marijuana or the nonprofit transfer of up to an ounce of marijuana. It would not change the federal statutes forbidding cultivation, import, export or for-profit sale of marijuana.
After four decades of the disastrous "War on Drugs," Americans have come to expect senseless, ruthless public policies, but Congress' ban on financial aid for students with a drug conviction takes the cake.
A student who commits murder, rape, or any other serious crime may still be eligible for financial aid. Yet, thanks to the "Aid Elimination Penalty" provision slipped into the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) without debate or a recorded vote, a student convicted of any drug offense — even possessing a single joint of marijuana — automatically loses federal financial aid eligibility. To date, more than 200,000 students have been denied federal loans, grants, and work-study because of the HEA's little-known penalty. Since most states use federal financial aid guidelines to determine eligibility for state-based financial aid, the provision has also resulted in a majority of states withholding aid to students convicted of a drug law violation.
While this decade has seen some states shift away from the counterproductive "lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" approach to nonviolent drug offenders, Oregon voters took a step backwards yesterday by approving Measure 57's mandates for increased sentences and new "mandatory minimum" sentencing requirements for a range of crimes, many of them nonviolent drug crimes. However, Measure 61 — a competing measure that would have increased mandatory minimum sentencing even more drastically — will not go into effect because Measure 57 received more votes.
With today’s victory for the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act, Michigan voters have pulled off a major breakthrough for the medical marijuana movement.Michigan is the first state in the Midwest to approve it — and, with 10 million people, it’s also the second most populous state to do so.
Medical marijuana isn’t a new issue in Michigan. Voters in five Michigan towns and cities – Ann Arbor, Detroit, Ferndale, Flint, and Traverse City — have previously approved medical marijuana, and legislation attempting to do so has been introduced in the Michigan legislature several times.
This Tuesday, California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offenders Rehabilitation Act (NORA). If it passes, NORA will shift California away from a criminal justice-oriented approach to substance abuse and toward a health-based approach, primarily by providing drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration for nonviolent offenders.
In the 1980s and 90s, "tough-on-crime" legislators held enough sway to pass draconian sentencing schemes that exponentially increased the number of Americans behind bars — mostly by sentencing nonviolent drug offenders to lengthy terms once reserved only for violent criminals. However, despite an 1,100 percent increase of drug offenders in prisons and jails over the last 25 years, the use of illegal drugs has remained steady. (Not to mention that drug-related harm has increased dramatically, as overdose deaths more than tripled from 1990 to 2005.)
Today, the public's attitudes about drugs have shifted. In 1989, when a Gallup poll posed the question, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" Twenty-six percent of respondents answered "Drugs; drug abuse." From 2004-2007, only 1 percent gave the same answer. Meanwhile, according to a Zogby poll released yesterday, 76 percent of Americans believe the "War on Drugs" is failing.
