Drug WarRant

Via TalkLeft comes Reefer Madness in the 8th Circuit by Doug Berman.

The defendant in Chauncey, as a result of a criminal history leading to his classification as a career offender, received a sentence of 100 months after being convicted of possessing with intent to distribute less than two ounces of marijuana. According to Judge Lay’s dissent, “Chauncey’s undisputed purpose was to help [his friend] obtain marijuana to alleviate the painful effects of her multiple sclerosis.”

Excellent comment on this by Aaron over at Sentening Law and Policy:

When Robert Lee Chauncey was arrested, he didn’t resist, he cooperated with the police and told the truth. Unfortunately it seems that his honesty and forthright behavior had no bearing on his sentencing whatsoever. In fact it seems to have worked against him and help consolidate the the prosecution’s case under the letter of the law.

Do we really want to see individuals who are apprehended with a few ounces of marijuana shooting it out with the police because they don’t want to spend the next decade in prison. That will be the likely consequence of these types of decisions.

The Provo Daily Herald discusses the permit issue for the attacked Utah rave. Why it took until today for this detail in reporting to be achieved is beyond me.

While the debate rages over the level of force police used to quell a party Saturday in Spanish Fork Canyon, the crucial legal question has shifted. Organizers may or may not have obtained a mass-gathering permit from the Utah County Commission — but did they need one?

[…]In addition to the health permit ensuring portable toilets, food and other health concerns, Utah County Code 13-4-2-1 mandates a security-related permit for any “anticipated assembly of 250 or more people which continues or can reasonably be expected to continue for 12 or more consecutive hours.”

The electronic dance beats began thumping at 9 p.m. Saturday in the Diamond Fork area and thrived for more than two hours before 90 fully armed SWAT members from various area teams swarmed the crowd of roughly 300.

Had authorities permitted the party to continue, event promoter Brandon Fullmer of Salt Lake City-based Uprock Records said the party was scheduled to conclude at 6:30 a.m. Sunday — a couple hours short of the limit set for the permit. Privately contracted security personnel as well as the sound technician (from Salt Lake-based Performance Audio) both confirmed they were contracted for that same time period. Fullmer and landowner Trudy Childs have retained a Salt Lake attorney who has filed formal legal requests for copies of all related documents from the health department, county attorney and commissioners.[…]

Nonsense, countered Utah Sheriff Jim Tracy. Based on 700 presold tickets and organizers’ anticipated crowd of thousands, he said authorities quite reasonably expected partygoers to linger to 9 a.m. and beyond.

Of course, Tracy has quite a history of poor judgment.
Note: Check out the picture in the first article. Looks like a gorgeous place for a rave.

Somebody put these DEA and SWAT guys away somewhere. Please. For the safety of Americans.
SWAT team raids wrong home:
State Police and DEA agents frighten residents and tear up house

A State Police SWAT team and a swarm of federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents stormed a four-family home in Newark on Tuesday, kicking down doors, waving guns and ransacking two upstairs apartments.

The officers tore through an armoire looking for guns and shouted curses at frightened adults as they clutched their young children.

Then the officers apologized for being in the wrong house.

Home health aide Cedelie Pompee, 59, was livid yesterday as she recounted how police rushed through the Smith Street house that she has owned for 27 years, leaving cracked door frames, broken doors and scuffed walls in their wake. Pompee shares the home with her two sisters, their children and another family that rents a downstairs apartment.

They didn’t realize their mistake at once.

With guns drawn, they went room by room, breaking through locked doors as they went. When Desir and other family members complained, the officers cursed at them and demanded to know where the guns were kept.

But after 15 minutes of fruitless searching, the officers realized they had made a mistake.

This, of course, after cursing at them. ‘Cause that’s how you do law enforcement these days. The people you’re after aren’t human. They’re the enemy.

State Police Sgt. Gerald Lewis confirmed yesterday the officers and DEA agents raided the wrong house. He would not reveal the nature of the investigation that led them to the house, other than to say it is ongoing. Lewis also refused to disclose who they were looking for.

So just how clueless are these people?

This is the second time in four months the State Police have raided the wrong home. In May, officers stormed the home of a retired truck driver in Woodbridge in search of a prostitution operation.

Yesterday, both Pompee and Desir questioned what kind of investigation even led police to a household of devout Jehovah’s Witnesses in the first place. If any surveillance had been done of the house with the iron gate and small herb garden, Desir said, officers would have known that no one in the house so much as smokes cigarettes or drinks alcohol.

“You’re trying to work in a community and get bad people, but you don’t even know where they live,” Desir said. “When you’re dealing with these type of neighborhoods, there’s no room for incompetent police officers.”

In Thursday’s Washington Times: Colombia helps Afghanistan wage drug war
Illinois’ Henry Hyde, idiot and Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, got this bright idea: Colombia has done so well with its drug war, why not have them tell Afghanistan how to do it?

“We warmly welcome the restoration of formal relations between Afghanistan and Colombia and especially the joint efforts of Colombia and its elite national police to help Afghanistan tackle the enormous problem of heroin production, which also fuels terrorism,” Mr. Hyde said yesterday. […]

“The Colombians are the world’s experts on establishing sovereignty and security over ungoverned space, especially when fighting narcotics-funded terrorists,” said Andre Hollis, a top Pentagon counterdrug official in President Bush’s first term.

And Hyde, of course, takes every opportunity to play the terror card…

“Colombia … has a lot to share and help our Afghan partners with in the global struggle against drugs and terror,” Mr. Hyde said.

When I first read it, I laughed. As I continued to think about it, I just got angrier. So absurd. So stupid.
Remember, despite what morons like Henry Hyde may say, drugs don’t fund terrorism. Prohibition does.

Today’s New York Times article: Profiling Report Leads to a Demotion is interesting in that it describes a process that has become amazingly typical in government use of data (particularly as it relates to the drug war).
Amid all the reports of racial profiling in highway stops, the Justice Department did a study – more comprehensive than past ones. The results were important and should be discussed nationally.
But the administration decided that the press release should only contain one part of the results — the data regarding rates that drivers of different races were stopped (8.6% for Hispanics, 9.1% for blacks, 8.7% for whites). That made it seem like there’s not much of an issue.
What was left out? Percentages of drivers whose vehicles were searched, and percentages of drivers who had force used against them. Those figures gave dramatically different results.
Lawrence Greenfield, the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 23 years and very highly respected in the field, objected to the partial truth press release.
He’s being demoted. Naturally.
Update: Here are some more of the data from the report (via the AP):

–Blacks (5.8 percent) and Hispanics (5.2 percent) were much more likely to be arrested than whites (2 percent).

–Hispanics (71.5 percent) were much more likely to be ticketed than blacks (58.4 percent) or whites (56.5 percent).

–Blacks (2.7 percent) and Hispanics (2.4 percent) were far more likely than whites (0.8 percent) to report that police used force or the threat of it. Force was defined as when an officer pushed, grabbed, kicked or hit a driver with a hand or object. Also included were police dog bites, chemical or pepper spray or a firearm pointed at the driver, or the threat of any of these.

–Handcuffs were used on greater percentages of black motorists (6.4 percent) and Hispanics (5.6 percent) than whites (2 percent).

–Black and Hispanic drivers and their vehicles were much more likely to be searched than whites and their vehicles. Black motorists were searched 8.1 percent of the time; Hispanics, 8.3 percent; whites, 2.5 percent. Vehicles driven by blacks were searched 7.1 percent of the time; by Hispanics, 10.1 percent; by whites, 2.9 percent.

Via Libby at Last One Speaks, I discover that there is a new blog with the title:
Notes on the MAPS/Craker/DEA hearing
concerning the establishment of a pilot medical marijuana production facility at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst
Rick Doblin is one of the bloggers, posting directly from the hearings.

Coverage of the attacked rave continues, and media sources in very conservative Utah are trying to figure out how to deal with it. The most confused appears to be the Daily Herald.
The first half of the opinion piece is paragraph after paragraph of law-and-order mantra, supporting the police activity and opining that the young people were wrong in their complaints about force, culminating in:

Clearly, some enforcement was needed in Diamond Fork on Saturday night.

Let’s state some basic facts, just for the record. Officers of the law carry guns. It is part of what they do. They often carry nonlethal weapons, too, such as bean-bag launchers or tear gas. They make plans for dealing with potentially difficult situations. Why? Because it’s their job to enforce the laws that have been duly enacted by elected authorities.

It’s called enforcement for a reason. Police don’t need to ask politely.

The best way to stay out of range of the police is to obey the law. It’s a lesson too many people have not learned.

But then, they veer off…

Having said that, however, we are concerned about the process that led to this raid, starting with Utah County permits. Commissioner Steve White was strangely evasive on this question. When asked point-blank whether a mass-gathering permit had been issued, he said he would not answer. He referred the Herald to law enforcement sources and the county attorney’s office.

Childs, the property owner, said all the permits were in order and that officers seized them at the gate. It was a legal gathering, she said.

To be sure, there were a number of drug- and alcohol-related arrests and citations arising from the rave. These are fair game by any measure. Once a crime is committed, a permit may be considered null and void. But of the 43 citations reported by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office, about half appear directly related to the raid itself — disorderly conduct, failure to disperse and related acts. Most of the others could have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis, without shutting down a concert at which the majority were not breaking the law.

A massive police assault on virtually any public gathering (a BYU football game, for example) would uncover similar illegalities, from drugs to weapons to expired driver’s licenses. But if a crime is committed during a BYU football game, the game is not stopped. Offenders are trundled off individually. A general suspicion that something illegal might happen at a public gathering, even a rave, may not be the best basis from which to launch a major law enforcement action.

What a shift in tone! Almost like they couldn’t possibly state the second half to their readers without first affirming their law-and-order credentials in the first half.
And it’s a very important statement that they make. Read it again…

But if a crime is committed during a BYU football game, the game is not stopped.

Exactly.
The Salt Lake City weekly had less concern about establishing their bonafides in their article: Iraq in Utah.
Just a slight nod…

Law-enforcement officers — so often overworked, underpaid and underappreciated — deserve the respect of citizenry. But based on personal accounts and digital-camera footage of that evening that have flooded the Internet since, even the most die-hard supporter of the local constabulary would feel remiss not asking questions.

And then go for the jugular:

There’s something telling, too, about the fact that the Sheriff’s Office learned at noon that day where the rave would commence, but waited more than two hours into the music — until 11:30 p.m. — to make 60 arrests and demand the area be cleared. Much was made of one young raver who “overdosed on ecstasy,” and then was released to her parents. If disaster was so imminent, and warranted 90 men in uniform, why wasn’t the rave politely stopped before it started? Perhaps because the spectacle of an outdoor event, like a rave itself, is a lot more fun than sitting at home.

Ouch.

What the press didn’t learn from the last drug panic
An interesting read from Jack Shafer.

Link
Good stuff — also includes transcripts from the hearings this week.

Among the DEA’s many faults is the extensive use of questionable or downright dishonest informants. (See my report on Bad Girl Michele Leonhart and the use of informant Andrew Chambers, who regularly lied on the witness stand.)
Here’s the latest.

The DEA first recruited [Essam] Magid as an informant in 1999 after an arrest on drug conspiracy charges. It has since paid him more than $77,000 and worked to get his drug charges dismissed, according to testimony.

The problem is that the FBI also used Magid, but dismissed him in 2002 for “revealing his undercover status and identifying two agents” (possibly endangering their lives).
That didn’t bother the DEA, so they continued to use Magid as an informant and, in testimony last week, his handler admitted that Magid may have intimidated a witness in a drug conspiracy case.
Magid seems perfect for the DEA. Maybe they can make him an agent next.