To all who say "do the crime..."

You seem to be totally missing the point, which is that it is unjust for the people charged with law enforcement to break laws in order to enforce others. It is morally reprehensible to have police consistently lying on the stand in order to convict people who are, in all probability, hurting nobody but themselves.

You can run from the point, but it is very apparent that this is what you are doing.

 

Part of "civil rights" includes being free from unjust prosecution. Since you didn't raise any points of contention about the article or the issues brought up since then (guess I shouldn't be surprised), I can only assume that you agree that it is unjust for the police to break one set of laws in order to enforce another set. It follows then, that one in this country SHOULD have the right to smoke a joint, especially since every study done since the late 1800s has found that mar1juana specifically should be legal (regulated, decriminalized or outright legal depending on the study).

 

But the real point is that officials break laws and lie on the stand every single day in the pursuit of the drug war and virtually none of them ever get charged, much less punished, for these crimes because these officials are "fighting the good fight." We have become tolerant of a whole host of crimes against us and infringements of our civil rights over an issue that should NEVER have been a law enforcement issue in the first place.

Prohibition is based on lies and corruption. These lies and this corruption will continue as long as people continue to allow themselves to be snowed by the government's position that "drugs are bad, mmmmmkay." I realize that I overuse that South Park reference, but that is the only thing that the govertnment position is based on. They don't have scientific evidence, they will not discuss or debate the issue, and they cannot allow any reforms at all because once they do, everyone will clearly see the fallacies of the "war on drugs."

You brought up some specific examples from the article, but the only example I need is Tulia. Dozens of (African-American) people were charged with crimes by a man with a history of lying on the stand. He had no video, no tape recordings, not even any notes, but the juries bought his story over and over again in the "he said, she said" game and convicted those people, sentancing many to jail for decades. Even though Tom Coleman is a perjurer, he remains free, continues to be on the DEA and FBI payroll, and continues to prosecute people for drug "offenses."

The people who went to jail in that case did not deserve to be there and even though they are now all free, Tom Coleman has the freedom to do the same thing over and over again.

THAT is the disgusting part.

 

I was asking for someone to dispute the logic that it is unjust to allow one set of laws to be broken in the course of trying to enforce another set of laws.

I agree that some of the examples in the article were hazy on details, but keep in mind that he was only coming up with examples from this week only. There are so many examples of officials breaking laws (see my "Corrupt Cops" threads) that a list of those offenses just for this year would be too long to go into a single post on this board (even bigger than a MacBeth post).

Obviously, statistics on this will be extremely hard to come by since police officers will not be able to answer honestly in a survey. One of the main people I have heard (read actually) talk about this is Sheriff Bill Masters, who wrote a book called "Drug War Addiction." He is a Sheriff in Colorado and talks extensively about lying on the stand and how prevalent the practice is. He specifically makes the point that since many of the tactics of the drug war are technically illegal, in order to make any busts at all the police need to gloss over the details or "dummy up" the reports for virtually every single drug bust. I highly recommend Masters' book and would be happy to lend it to you if you like.


Here are a couple of more examples of testilying...

Newsbrief: Federal Judge Rules Cops Can Lie on the Stand 10/22/04
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/359/knoxville.shtml
We've all heard about the "drug exception" to the Fourth Amendment, but what about the "drug exception" to the laws governing perjury? According to a Sunday report in the Knoxville (Tennessee) Sentinel-News, that may be okay, too. US District Court Magistrate Bruce Guyton ruled as much in an opinion in a complex undercover drug investigation issued last week, the newspaper reported.

A DEA-led task force had targeted Aaron Brown and his colleagues in a drug conspiracy investigation and concocted a ruse to get him. The task force used a Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper who knew all about the conspiracy investigation to pull over Brown's vehicle on the pretext of a traffic violation. The trooper seized a pound of cocaine from Brown.

So far, so good. The trooper's behavior was sleazy, but legal. But then the trooper, Johnny McDonald, appeared in court to testify against Brown and proceeded to perjure himself. The only reason he stopped Brown's vehicle, he told the court, was because Brown had a temporary license tag on the car. McDonald failed to tell the court that the license tag was a ruse and that he was stopping Brown because he was the subject of a DEA investigation.

Because McDonald told the court the only reason for stopping the car was the temporary tag, the presiding sessions court judge ruled the stop was illegal and threw out the cocaine as evidence. But when Brown appeared in federal court on drug conspiracy charges and his attorney asked Magistrate Guyton to follow the sessions court's lead and throw out the evidence, Guyton demurred.

In a mind-boggling interpretation of federal law, Guyton held that it is not what officers say on the stand but what they really know that matters. "The legality of a stop must be judged by the objective facts known to the seizing officers rather than by the justifications articulated by them," Guyton wrote, citing a Sixth US Court of Appeals ruling. Most bizarrely, Magistrate Guyton refused to label McDonald a liar, instead writing that he found the trooper's testimony "credible."

While Guyton did not explicitly address the question of perjury, or "testilying," as it is known in cop-speak, he implicitly gave the practice a judicial thumbs-up by allowing the contested cocaine to be entered into evidence. In theory, Officer McDonald could be prosecuted criminally for perjury, but that is extremely unlikely to happen.

We wouldn't want little technicalities like truth and justice get in the way of the drug war, now, would we?


Drug War Perjury Highlighted In Congressional Impeachment Hearings 12/4/98
http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/069/perjury.shtml
The ongoing congressional hearings on Presidential Impeachment took a turn of interest for drug policy reformers this week as Harvard Law School professor and Author Alan Dershowitz testified that the President's perjury pales in comparison with the culture of lying which has become ingrained in the criminal justice system. Dershowitz cited, among others, the Mollen Commission's recent findings, which claimed that perjury was so rampant among police officers that the practice had been given its own term in some law enforcement circles, "testilying," and Joseph McNamara, former chief of police of San Jose and Kansas City, and current fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution (and board member of the Drug Policy Foundation), who said that "hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit perjury every year testifying about drug arrests alone."

Dershowitz testified that not only did the President's misstatements under oath constitute the least important and damaging form of perjury (lying to avoid personal embarrassment where the lie was not materially relevant to the substance of the proceedings), which he called the nation's most common and least prosecuted crime, but that perjury is prosecuted selectively, if at all, with motivations ranging from the political to the tactical.

Dershowitz is far from the only national figure to point out the prevalence of perjury in criminal, and specifically drug enforcement, as evidenced by McNamara's quote. But it was encouraging for reformers to hear the problem referenced on such a national stage by such a respected figure.

The Week Online spoke with Professor Dershowitz.

WOL: In your testimony, you spoke about the impact of the drug war, and its prosecution, on the criminal justice process, particularly with regard to perjury by police officers. What has been the impact of the drug war on the system as a whole?
Dershowitz: Well, I think that drug wars have done more to undercut civil liberties than perhaps any other phenomenon in recent history. Start with the fact that we call it a war, and all's fair in war. In the minds of many officers, and prosecutors, they are just doing what they need to do to fight the war.

WOL: So you believe that Prohibition is a failed policy?

Dershowitz: Criminalizing drugs has actually created crime, and criminals. The drugs are out there, and we've insured that they're valuable. The drug war corrupts by its very nature.

WOL: How prevalent, in your view, has perjury become in the prosecution of the war?

Dershowitz: Perjury by police is rampant, and the vast majority of it concerns the circumstances of searches for drugs. It (the drug war) has had a deeply corrosive impact on the system in that regard. In most cases, there are no complaining witnesses in a drug transaction, and so it is far easier to convict if testimony is tailored to what the prosecutor needs to hear.

WOL: How can this problem be addressed?

Dershowitz: We as a society are going to have to think very hard about making changes in our response to drugs. Obviously we need to decriminalize mar1juana, that's an easy issue. There are just no good arguments against it. We also need to look into medicalizing heroin addiction, as they are doing in some places in Europe. As to cocaine, that's a little tougher issue. But there is no doubt that there has to be a better system than we have now. We need an open-minded inquiry into our drug policy, because the current policy is causing tremendous damage.

 

You can refuse to buy that number if you like, but Sheriff Bill Masters said in his book that every single drug prosecution he has ever been involved in had some sort of perjury involved, whether on the stand, in a deposition, or on official arrest reports.

It happens every single day in every single state in our nation. Virtually every single police officer who is involved in a drug arrest has doctored the truth, even if just a little bit, in order to get around those pesky civil liberties and rights. It only makes sense when you don't have an actual complaintant that it will take some massaging of the truth to assure that the "bad guys" (most often consenting adults who haven't ever done anything to harm another person) go to jail for their "offenses."

Check out what the law enforcement officers themselves have to say about prohibition. http://www.leap.cc/


EDIT: In addition, look at the source of the statement you take issue with. It was made by Joseph McNamara, former chief of police of San Jose and Kansas City, and current fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution (and board member of the Drug Policy Foundation). This isn't just some guy on the street, this is someone who has been intimately involved with the drug war for quite some time. I would assert that he knows a great deal more about the inner workings of the drug war than you or even I do.

 

In order to secure a conviction, it is required for exactly that authentication to happen. Even so, as Bill Masters said in his book, every single drug arrest he was ever a part of (in his 20 years as a Sheriff in Colorado) had some degree of perjury involved. Keep in mind that this is even the case when it comes to cops that are not "dirty" in the least. We are not talking about the cops who rob drug dealers or steal from evidence lockers, we are talking about rank and file officers who simply have to massage the truth in order to secure a conviction.

Keep in mind that over 700,000 people were arrested just for mar1juana crimes last year. If we conservatively estimate that another 100,000 were arrested for other drug "crimes," then it doesn't take but a quarter of those cases to qualify as "hundreds of thousands" (I think 200,000 qualifies).

And both men were staunch prohibitionists before seeing the fallacy of the "war on drugs." In reading Masters' book, he explains that he was very much part fo the drug war orthodoxy for over a decade before seeing the damage that this policy has caused. It is easy to say that anyone who talks negatively about prohibition is a "biased source," but it doesn't make their opinions invalid, it just makes sense that the only people who would talk this way about the drug war would be biased against it.

As giddyup asked earlier, if I cannot cite sources that you claim are biased against the drug war, what source AM I supposed to cite?

If you are insistant that these men are too biased to be trusted, I would appreciate it if you would come up with any reputable source that supports the contention that prohibition is the best way to deal with the issue of drug use and abuse in our society. Good luck, every single scientific study of this issue since the late 1800s has found that prohibition is definitively NOT the bast way to deal with this issue.