Mother Jones has a new issue, much of which addresses the failure of the war on drugs. Among those they interviewed was David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire. Here's what he had to say (sorry, no link):

"We are the jailingest motherf*ckers on the planet. More than that, the number of violent offenders in federal prisons has gone down to its
lowest level ever in the history of the country -- in the single digits, by the Bureau of Prisons' own statistics. And the political party that
let this get out of control? It was the Democrats.

The drug war has actually destroyed the deterrent in inner cities by teaching whole police departments to chase drug stats when they should be solving crimes. And, of course, because they can't put all those people in prison, it doesn't even work as a draconian policy. Most people are just thrown back onto the street.

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This is really big news. For the first time in U.S. history, a state commission will investigate whether an innocent man was executed.

A Texas panel will investigate whether a man executed for setting a fire that killed his three daughters actually started the blaze.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission agreed Friday to review conclusions that Cameron Todd Willingham set the fire in 1991. He was executed in 2004.... The Innocence Project, a legal group that works to overturn wrongful convictions, says experts in a report it commissioned concluded the fire was not intentionally set.

You can read JR's diary about it on Daily Kos . One of the experts who co-authored the Innocence Project report is his father, John Lentini, who has written extensively on fire science and errors made during investigations.

The executed inmate was Cameron Todd Willingham #999041. Read the results of a 2004 exhaustive investigation into the case by award-winning Chicago Tribune investigative reporters Maurice Possley and Steve Mills. [More...]

Senior U.S. District Court Judge John L Kane, Jr. (Colorado) issued a brave sentencing decision today in a child p!rnography case. (Opinion in USA v. Rausch, here.)

In it, Judge Kane examines the purpose of sentencing and punishment, invoking Lord Denning, Dostoyevsky and others.

The defendant was charged with possession of less than 100 child p!rn images. The Sentencing Guidelines called for a sentence of 97 to 120 months. The Government asked for 97 months. [More...]

The efficacy of a crime fighting technique is often used as its justification, even at the expense of privacy. Police agencies using infrared heat sensors to uncover marijuana grow lights inside residences, without bothering to obtain a search warrant, argued that they were merely measuring heat in the public air to catch bad guys before the Supreme Court concluded that their efforts violated the Fourth Amendment.

The latest controversial use of technology to invade privacy is GPS tracking. A transmitter is surreptitiously attached to a suspect's car, and the police follow the suspect's movements electronically.

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The Antonio family owns a little grocery store in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles. Plagued by taggers who covered their walls with graffiti, they finally paid $3,000 to a team of graffiti artists to paint murals on the building. Because the artists they hired had "street cred," taggers respected the work and left it alone. Problem solved? Not exactly.

"ORDER TO COMPLY," said the letter from the Building and Safety Department, which required the Antonios to remove "excessive signage" under threat of a $1,000 fine "and/or six (6) months imprisonment" for each of four alleged violations.

The Antonios called the office of Councilman Ed Reyes for help, but to little avail. One day the city sent out a work crew and just like that, the Antonios' $3,000 investment was gone, covered over with dull beige paint.

You know what happened next: taggers covered the blank walls with graffiti by the next morning. Great work, city government. You managed to respond to a problem that had been solved by making it worse.

A British drug warrior has come to the realization that drug abuse should be treated as a public health problem, not as a crime.

A former senior civil servant who was responsible for coordinating the government's anti-drugs policy now believes that legalisation would be less harmful than the current strategy. Julian Critchley, the former director of the Cabinet Office's anti-drugs unit, also said that his views were shared by the "overwhelming majority" of professionals in the field, including police officers, health workers and members of the government.

Critchley points out that "enforcement and supply-side interventions ... have no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs." His belief "that New Labour's policy on drugs was based on what was thought would play well with the Daily Mail readership, regardless of evidence of what worked," parallels the belief of American politicians that a "tough on drugs" attitude plays well with the voting public despite overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice approach has failed. When will our policy makers have the courage to learn the obvious truth that Critchley has embraced?

The Drug Enforcemnt Administration releases statistics every year on drug seizures. In past years, as I wrote here, up to 98% of the marijuana plants they seized was unusable, non psychotropic "ditchweed."

What's "ditchweed?"

[It's] a term the agency uses to define "wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing, or tending." Unlike cultivated marijuana, feral hemp contains virtually no detectable levels of THC, the psychoactive component in cannabis, and does not contribute to the black market marijuana trade.

NORML senior policy analyst Paul Armentano has an article today questioning why the DEA, this year, is no longer publishing "ditchweed" stats.

Good question.

It's funny how police and prosecutors rarely take the word of anyone who has been arrested for a crime, unless they want to use that person to testify against someone else. The criminal who wants to buy his way out of a sentence is suddenly a model of rectitude, a sterling citizen who would never dream of lying.

Snitches who testify against someone else for personal gain -- whether freedom or money -- are unworthy of belief. Yet their testimony sends people to prison every day, or convinces judges to impose harsher sentences by (for instance) painting a street level dealer as a drug kingpin. After all, the "better" a snitch makes his information sound, the more valuable it becomes and the better deal he expects in return for snitching.

An excellent article by Christopher Moraff explains why the rat trap is sending innocent people to prison. [more ...]

To balance the budget, Illiniois Governor Rod Blagojevich has vetoed funds earmarked to prevent and correct wrongful convictions:

In a state known for sending innocent people to prison, Gov. Rod Blagojevich has angered prosecutors and defense attorneys alike by vetoing millions of dollars lawmakers set aside to fight wrongful convictions and support sweeping death penalty reforms.

One budget cut eliminated first-time funding for a Downstate advocacy group with several key court victories on behalf of convicted defendants. Another veto blocked funds for videotaping interrogations in murder cases under a law championed by Barack Obama when he was a state lawmaker.

More than $5.5 million approved by lawmakers to prevent or correct wrongful convictions was among the $1.4 billion Blagojevich vetoed this month to bring the state budget in line, according to interviews and a review of budget documents. The vetoes included money to support the reforms he signed five years ago to ensure the integrity of the state's capital punishment process.

I can't help but wonder had Obama, who worked so hard for some of the reforms, been attending to his day job as well as campaigning, whether he might have talked some sense into Blagojevich. These cuts should have been something, even as a Senator no longer in state politics, he fought the Governor tooth and nail on.

When a snitch accuses someone of a crime in order to reduce a sentence that he anticipates or is already serving, there's good reason to doubt the snitch's credibility. Law enforcement agents and prosecutors nonetheless have few qualms about building cases around the testimony of a snitch -- unless the snitch points the finger of blame in the wrong direction, like Raymond Garrett did.

Garrett, who founded the Brick Money Entertainment record company, made a deal with federal prosecutors. He pled guilty to a drug trafficking charge. In exchange for his agreement to cooperate against other wrongdoers, prosecutors agreed to recommend that he receive a 10 year sentence. So far, everybody's happy.

But then "Garrett told investigators that two Utica police officers were involved in criminal activity." If he had made similar allegations against anyone else, they may have been taken at face value, as they so often are. Police and prosecutors were less willing to believe him after he accused the police. [more ...]

Try to wrap your mind around this logic:

Joshua Marquis, district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore. ... rarely, if ever, drops criminal charges because a defendant passed a lie detector test prior to trial. "The science behind them is not strong," Marquis said. "The absolute worst offenders -- people who are true sociopaths -- lying is a way of life for them, so they're going to probably pass them easily."

Marquis, does, however, see polygraphs as a useful tool in monitoring probationers, a growing practice that has been upheld by dozens of courts despite defense lawyers' claims that such tests violate the constitutional right against self-incrimination.

So lie detector tests aren't reliable when defendants offer them as proof of innocence, but they suddenly become reliable when a probation agent wants to question a probationer. Can't have it both ways, Mr. Marquis. [more ...]

Not surprisingly, I don't often get promotional e-mails from the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration. Today I did, with the news that another convention will be taking place in Colorado just before the Democratic National Convention. It's the Law Enforcement Explorers.

Law Enforcement Exploring is a worksite-based program for young men and women who have completed the eighth grade and are 14-20 years old. Law Enforcement Explorer posts around the country help youth to gain insight into a variety of programs that offer hands-on career activities. For young men and women who are interested in careers in the field of law enforcement, Exploring offers experiential learning with lots of fun-filled, hands-on activities that promote the growth and development of adolescent youth.

4,500 teens from all 50 states will be attending the conference. Details of the "fun-filled activities":

The week-long conference will take place on the campus of Colorado State University and will feature several team competitions including arrest and search techniques, crime scene investigation, bomb threat response, and hostage negotiations. Seminars on gang violence, psychological profiling, effective communication, narcotics trafficking and interdiction, and border protection are also planned.

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