MONICA GARCIA’S STUDENT BILL OF RIGHTS

On Tuesday, LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia introduced a motion that, if adopted by the board, would establish a Student Bill of Rights for school discipline.

It’s a carefully constructed motion that is supported by a range of organizations including Public Counsel, Liberty Hill, The California Endowment, Community Coalition, and a host of student groups, and it lays out a set of rules and guidelines for schools regarding the way they discipline students. Among other things, the motion mandates transparency and good record keeping in the discipline process, and a clear delineation of the role of school police on campus.

It also mandates that all students have access to what is known as School-Wide Positive Behavior Interventions (SWPBIS), a strategy that has been shown to reduce suspensions, increases attendance, and even to improve academic performance.

But, if passed, the biggest change the motion would put into place is the removal from the school discipline tool kit the use of “willful defiance” as a reason for suspension or expulsion.

Here’s the wording:

Beginning Fall 2013, no student shall be suspended or expelled for a “willful defiance” (48900(k) offense

Willful defiance is a blunt instrument that youth advocates and education reformers have been working hard to get taken off the table at a state level, but the state legislature and the governor have, thus far, balked. Thus for LAUSD to lead the way would be a positive development indeed. (And perhaps it would lead the way for passage of AB 420.)

Oddly, Tuesday’s LA Times editorial that discussed Garcia’s resolution, praised most of it, but took is issue only with the removal of “willful defiance” as an option.

We believe the Times is wrong-headed in its objection.

Here’s the relevant clip (italics ours):

The resolution, which is scheduled to come before the board Tuesday, would require schools to use other measures to combat willful defiance, including setting clearer expectations and providing counseling to get at the root of bad behavior when possible, both of which have been found to be more effective than suspension. But it also would allow schools to devise additional programs that might prove even more useful, such as detention, or setting up a special classroom, with schoolwork to be done and tutors available, so that students who act up in class aren’t allowed to continue disrupting the education of other students but also don’t fall behind in their studies.

Where the resolution goes off course is with its zero tolerance for suspending defiant students under any circumstances. The district still has not figured out how to deal with the most persistently disruptive students, those who don’t respond to counseling, and it shouldn’t completely tie the schools’ hands....

We don’t agree.

As we briefly outlined here earlier this week, in 2009, Jose Huerta, the principal of Garfield High School in East LA, not only took willful defiance off the table at his school, he took the radical step of doing away suspensions and expulsions altogether (except in extreme instances where demanded by state law). The result was, after less than two years, Garfield had a much healthier, safer campus, and suspensions went from 683…down to one. A year after that, the school’s state achievement scores (API) had jumped 75 points.

There are other examples elsewhere in the country. But Garfield is the closest, and the best.

Garcia’s motion will be voted on next month. We hope those behind the Times editorial will have done some further research and thinking on the issue between then and now.

(You can read Garcia’s motion here, but scroll down to page 24, item 44.)

ARCH CONSERVATIVES URGE CONGRESS TO GET RIGHT WITH STATES’ GANJA LAWS

Tim Dickenson of Rolling Stone has the story. Here’s a clip:

There’s a new congressional push to end the federal War on Pot in the states – and it’s being spearheaded by some of the most conservative members of the Republican conference.

The “Respect State Marijuana Laws Act” introduced in the House last week would immunize anyone acting legally under state marijuana laws from federal prosecution under the Controlled Substances Act. Depending on the state, the legislation would cover both medical marijuana and recreational pot, and would protect not only the users of state-legal cannabis, but also the businesses that cultivate, process, distribute and sell marijuana in these states.

The legislation is in keeping with poll data released last week from Pew Research that found that 60 percent of Americans believe the feds should allow states to self-regulate when it comes to marijuana. The same poll finds that 57 percent of Republicans also favor this approach, which may explain why this bill is attracting arch-conservative backers in the House.

The three GOP co-sponsors are:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, who is best known to liberals as a villainous climate denier for theorizing that global warming is the result of “dinosaur flatulence.”

Read the rest, to find out who else—from both the (R) and (D) sides— makes up this ganja gang.

LAPD SAYS ZERO TOLERANCE RE: PERJURY

The story by KPCC reporter Erika Aguilar is a sad one, really. Two LAPD motor cops may have made an innocent mistake in the way they wrote up a DUI stop, which led to the officers perjuring themselves—even though it seems there was no reason to do it. Nothing to gain. But Chief Charlie Beck said (in so many words) that the LAPD is firm about zero tolerance for lying on police reports and perjury.

That is, obviously, as it should be. Holding the line on a principal means holding it everywhere, no excuses. Let us hope the line is consistant throughout the department.

Here’s a clip from Aguilar’s story:

The criminal trial of two Los Angeles police motorcycle cops accused of lying under oath about conducting a DUI traffic stop began this week.

Craig Allen, who was fired, and Phillip Walters, who is on suspension from the force, were charged last year with perjury and falsifying a police report.

The incident occurred in Highland Park just after midnight three years ago. LAPD traffic cops were on watch for impaired driving. A DUI task force was in full force that night.

Officer Cecilio Flores watched a driver roll through one stop sign and then another before pulling her over. He said she had bloodshot eyes and smelled of alcohol. Flores radioed over officers Walter and Allen to assist him with the stop and then take over, a “hand-off” as described in court or a “gimme.”

The DUI stop continued its fairly routine course. The driver was given a field sobriety test, arrested and transported to jail, and Allen began the paperwork.

That last step, the written police report, is the meat of this case.

“He wrote that he was in the area when they observed and pulled over the vehicle,” said prosecutor Rosa Alarcon in her opening statement. “He didn’t mention Flores.”

Alarcon said Walters later testified during a Department of Motor Vehicles hearing regarding the woman’s driver’s license that he saw her driving that night. She added that officer Allen testified at another hearing giving specific details about how they pulled over the driver — but admitted that he hadn’t personally observed the offense after audio of the dispatch recording was played.

“The defendants made a conscious decision to lie,” Alarcon said.

OAKLAND WILL VOTE ON CONTROVERSIAL CHOICE TO HIRE BILL BRATTON TO HELP ITS TROUBLED POLICE DEPARTMENT

Next week, the Oakland City Council will vote on whether or not to pay former LA Police Chief Bill Bratton $250K to help it straighten out its problem-ridden PD, a possibility that has triggered a storm of controversy among Oaklanders—which is fascinating for us Bratton-experienced folks in LA to watch.

Here, for example, are a few of the pros and cons of bringing Bratton to Oakland that are being discussed:

The East Bay Express points out that Bratton is likely to recommend some version of CompStat for Oakland, the data driven strategy which the UN-data-savvy OPD could use as it seeks to lower its spiking crime rate that claimed 131 lives in 2012.

The Express also notes that Bratton favors geographic policing, putting more officers in hot zones, plus some version of community policing to bolster better relationships with crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Oh, yeah, and Oakland has a lousy clearance rate for crimes. Bratton likes good clearance rates—all of which the Express views at the “pros.”

In terms of “cons,” Express worries that Bratton will bring in the kind of stop-and-frisk policy, which has drawn a raft of criticism (and accompanying lawsuits) in NYC.

We think this is unlikely, since Bratton’s savvy enough to realize that such a policy would enrage Oakland residents. Moreover, the OPD has too few officers (600) to pull it off anyway, even if Bratton wanted to (which he won’t)..

Tammerlin Drummond of the Oakland Tribune points out that even if Bratton has great ideas, he’s just a consultant so cannot actually put any policies in place without the cooperation of Oakland’s notoriously quarrelsome political structure. (Good point.)

The bay area’s Indymedia is the most critical of the proposed Bratton hire, basically painting Bill as the “Supercop” antichrist who ruined New York and LA. To wit:

Bratton-style policing has proven over and over to cause more long-term damage than not, to atomize and antagonize poor people and people of color, and to ignore creative, community-led solutions.

We disagree. In Los Angeles, relationships between the cops and the city’s poorest communities actually improved under Bratton who, while not perfect, was refreshingly unafraid to talk about race during his LA tenure. (But such pesky facts ruin the drama, we realize.)

In any case, if Oakland does indeed hire Bratton, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

LA TIMES JIM NEWTON SEES A SMALL BIT OF GOOD NEWS IN THE FIRST YEAR OF NEWEST DCFS CHIEF

Thank goodness for the work of LA Times columnist Jim Newton, who in the past year has turned his reportorial light on LA’s embattled foster care system, whenever he can.

For instance, in this week’s column, Newton looks at the hope-producing attitude of the latest in a string of “new” heads of LA’s troubled Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), a guy named Phillip Browning. Newton also acknowledges how complicated the whole thing is and how, even with the best of intentions, things can go terribly wrong.

Here’s a clip from the column:

…One profoundly important shift has been Browning’s approach to children. In recent years, the department has stressed the importance of keeping families together whenever possible. Browning argues that a child’s safety should trump all other concerns, even when it means taking children from their parents.

“If we think the child is safe, we leave the child with the biological parents,” he explained in the soft Southern accent that causes some to underestimate his toughness. “Sometimes, of course, that’s just not possible.”

Browning’s more stringent approach has meant an increase in the number of children removed from their homes. Last year, the agency filed 14,785 petitions, most of them in connection with detaining children, an increase from 13,481 the year before. What that means in raw terms is that the county last year removed a child from his or her home more than 200 times a week on average.

The hope is that children are protected once they’re under the county’s care, but the sad truth is that they face a capricious future. Some land with capable foster families, and perhaps will be adopted. Some are returned home to families that have recovered from the initial incident and will go on to raise them well. Others, however, are shuttled from one foster home or group facility to another, and grow up without any sense of coherent, dependable family. Some are physically or sexually abused. Some die….

NOBEL LAUREATE IN ECONOMICS EXPLAINS WHY IT’S TIME TO FACE UP TO THE TERRIBLE COSTS OF THE LOST WAR ON DRUGS.

Over the weekend, the conservative-leaning WSJ ran a strongly worded essay by Nobel laureate in economics, Gary Becker, and economics law prof, Kevin Murphy, stating unequivocally that the war on drugs is “a failed experiment,” and “the human cost has become too high,” and that it’s time to decriminalize.

Here’s a clip:

President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. The expectation then was that drug trafficking in the United States could be greatly reduced in a short time through federal policing—and yet the war on drugs continues to this day. The cost has been large in terms of lives, money and the well-being of many Americans, especially the poor and less educated. By most accounts, the gains from the war have been modest at best.

The direct monetary cost to American taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, the court personnel used to try drug users and traffickers, and the guards and other resources spent on imprisoning and punishing those convicted of drug offenses. Total current spending is estimated at over $40 billion a year.

These costs don’t include many other harmful effects of the war on drugs that are difficult to quantify. For example, over the past 40 years the fraction of students who have dropped out of American high schools has remained large, at about 25%. Dropout rates are not high for middle-class white children, but they are very high for black and Hispanic children living in poor neighborhoods. Many factors explain the high dropout rates, especially bad schools and weak family support. But another important factor in inner-city neighborhoods is the temptation to drop out of school in order to profit from the drug trade.

After that, Becker and Murphy do a cost/benefit analysis that is fascinating, so read on.

WHEN DEATH ROW LAWYERS SCREW UP, IT’S THE CLIENTS WHO TAKE THE HITS

In Tuesday’s NY Times Adam Liptak has a story filled with cautionary tales about lawyers disastrously screwing up in death row cases and the horrifying unwillingness of appeals courts to remedy the situations.

Here’s a clip from the opening:

Twice in recent years, the Supreme Court rebuked the federal appeals court in Atlanta for its rigid attitude toward filing deadlines in capital cases. The appeals court does not seem to be listening.

A few days after Christmas, a divided three-judge panel of the court ruled that Ronald B. Smith, a death row inmate in Alabama, could not pursue a challenge to his conviction and sentence because he had not “properly filed” a document by a certain deadline.

As it happens, there is no dispute that the document was filed on time. But it was not “properly filed,” the majority said, because Mr. Smith’s lawyer did not at the same time pay the $154 filing fee or file a motion to establish something also not in dispute — that his client was indigent.

Nor did the majority place much weight on the fact that the lawyer himself was on probation for public intoxication and addicted to crystal methamphetamine while he was being less than punctilious. In the months that followed, the lawyer would be charged with drug possession, declare bankruptcy and commit suicide.

Mr. Smith is almost surely guilty of murdering a convenience store clerk in 1994 in Huntsville, Ala. But it is not clear that he deserves to die for his crime.

His jury, by a vote of seven to five, determined that the murder did not warrant the death penalty, recommending instead that Mr. Smith be sentenced to life in prison….

Read on.

As we near the end of 2012, we at WitnessLA believe there is quite a bit to be thankful for within the social justice sphere–breakthroughs, big wins (and smaller wins), opened doors, and steps in the right direction. Here are fifteen items on our list, in no particular order:

1. We’re thankful to Senator Leland Yee for drafting SB 9, the Fair Sentencing for Youth Act, and to Gov. Brown for having the good sense to sign the bill that gives certain juvies serving life-without-parole the possibility of a second chance.

2. We’re thankful that Californians passed Prop 36, the three-strikes reform legislation.

3. We’re thankful that California’s education system will not have to find out what would have happened if Prop 30 had not passed.

4. We’re thankful for the rigor with which the members and staff of the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence approached their task, which led to a strong set of findings, and a thorough list of recommendations.

5. We’re also thankful for the many LASD people—present and former— who have courageously come forward: to us, to the LA Times, to the commission and to those guys and girls on Wilshire Blvd.

6. We’re thankful to Judge Michael Nash for shining light on Child Dependency Court proceedings by allowing media access, and to the 2nd District of the California Court of Appeals for denying petitions against Judge Nash’s decision.

7. We’re thankful for the passage of marijuana laws in Washington and Colorado as steps toward rectifying the harm done by a failed drug war.

8. We’re thankful for SCOTUS’ ban of mandatory juvenile life-without-parole sentencing. (It’s one step in the direction of banning juvie LWOP altogether.)

9. We’re also thankful to SCOTUS for ruling preposterously long sentences for youth unconstitutional.

10. We’re thankful for the wise and important findings of the California State Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color created by Assembly speaker John Perez, and chaired by Assemblyman Sandré Swanson.

11. We’re thankful that, slowly but surely, the US is making progress toward equal rights for the LGBT community (shout out to Washington, Maryland, Maine, and Minnesota).

12. We’re also thankful to Gov. Brown for making CA the first state to ban gay conversion therapy for youth.

13. We’re thankful for all those who are pushing for zero-tolerance reform in LAUSD schools and across the nation.

14. We’re thankful to SCOTUS for striking down most of the harsh AZ immigration law, SB 1070.

15. We’re thankful that, a year after the program commenced on Oct. 1, 2011, people are finally starting to talk sense about California’s prison realignment process—rather than painting it counter-factually as a plot to endanger public safety by releasing prisoners early. (We are particularly grateful to the LA Times Rob Greene for snapping some of the worst fact-offenders out of their stupor.) We’re also thankful for the programs that are starting to spring up in various counties that see realignment as an opportunity, rather than a burden.

VETERANS’ PTSD NOT YET A QUALIFIER FOR MEDICAL MARIJUANA USE

Right now, Oregon veterans seeking to use medical marijuana to treat their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder must have a different qualifying condition to legally receive the drug. Veterans and advocates of medical marijuana are pushing to get PTSD on the list of approved conditions, but are being met with political opposition.

The Oregonian’s Noelle Crombie has the story. Here are some clips:

As with virtually all marijuana-related matters in the United States, the debate over expanding Oregon’s program to include PTSD is politically charged. The drug’s outlaw status under federal law makes it a lightning rod for controversy. Two previous attempts to add PTSD to Oregon’s program have failed, and Colorado and Arizona officials recently rejected efforts to add the condition to their medical marijuana programs.

Law enforcement in Oregon generally opposes the expansion of the program. Some drug treatment providers caution against treating PTSD sufferers with what they view as an addictive drug.

Oregon is home to an estimated 300,000 veterans, including more than 20,000 from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, according to the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs. A 2008 Rand Corporation study found nearly 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan vets reported PTSD symptoms.

Jason Hansman, senior program manager for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said medical marijuana’s potential to help sick veterans deserves serious examination.

“We treat it like any other new treatment technique: We want to see it studied. We want to see increased research to see if it’s a viable solution,” said Hansman, whose group represents 145,000 veterans.

[SNIP]

States considering whether to add PTSD to their medical marijuana programs face a lack of research on the topic, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Dr. John H. Halpern, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and researcher at McLean Hospital outside Boston, one of the country’s leading psychiatric hospitals, said there’s an “overabundance of case reports” suggesting marijuana aids PTSD sufferers. In a recently published paper, Halpern presented a case study he helped conduct on a PTSD sufferer whose marijuana use dramatically eased his symptoms.

But the politics of marijuana bogs down any meaningful examination of its benefits, Halpern said.

CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANTS OFTEN REPLACE UNDERCOVER OFFICERS IN DANGEROUS DRUG OPERATIONS

Sarah Stillman has an excellent article for The New Yorker called “The Throwaways” on the unchecked use young confidential informants in the war on drugs and the life-threatening situations they are often put in. Even if you don’t subscribe to the New Yorker, find a way to get a hold of this article (found in the Sept. 3rd issue). Here is a clip from the abstract:

On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old recent Florida State graduate named Rachel Hoffman got into her Volvo sedan and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida. On the passenger seat beside her was a handbag that contained thirteen thousand dollars in marked bills.

She was not a trained narcotics operative. Perhaps what put her at ease was the knowledge that nineteen law-enforcement agents were tracking her every move, and that a Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance plane was circling overhead.

Three weeks earlier, police officers had arrived at the door of her apartment after someone complained about the smell of marijuana. The cops seized slightly more than five ounces of pot and several Ecstasy and Valium pills. Hoffman could face serious prison time for felony charges.

The officer in charge, Ryan Pender, told her that she might be able to help herself if she provided “substantial assistance” to the city’s narcotics team. She believed that any charges against her could be reduced, or even dropped.

The operation did not go as planned. By the end of the hour, police lost track of her and her car. By the evening of her disappearance, Rachel Morningstar Hoffman had been working for the Tallahassee Police Department for almost three weeks. In bureaucratic terms, she was Confidential Informant No. 1129. In legal parlance, she was a “coöperator,” one of thousands of people who, each year, help the police build cases against others, often for the promise of leniency in the U.S. criminal-justice system.

Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to eighty per cent of all drug cases in America involve them, often in active roles like Hoffman’s. For police departments facing budget woes, untrained C.I.s are an inexpensive way of outsourcing the work of undercover officers.

Unlike wiretaps and other highly regulated investigative techniques, informants can be deployed without a warrant. Often, their efforts involve no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let alone lawyers, judges, or public scrutiny. Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, sometimes as young as fourteen or fifteen. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used with striking disregard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.

CA DEATH SENTENCE OVERTURNED

The CA Supreme Court overturned Miguel Bacigalupo’s death sentence Monday due to unearthed evidence that the prosecution failed to present to the defense during the double murder trial. The court determined that there was a probability that the jury would have recommended life in prison without parole had the jurors heard the missing evidence.

The San Jose Mercury’s Howard Mintz has the story. Here are some clips:

In a unanimous ruling, the seven-member court, which seldom overturns California death sentences, ordered a new penalty phase trial for Miguel Bacigalupo, who was sent to death row for the 1983 slayings of two brothers in their San Jose jewelry store. The Supreme Court left Bacigalupo’s murder convictions intact, but concluded that prosecutorial misconduct could have altered the jury’s death sentence recommendation.

The Supreme Court largely followed the findings of a superior court judge assigned to explore allegations that the lead prosecutor, current Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Joyce Allegro, and her lead investigator decades ago did not reveal crucial evidence to the defense that a Colombian drug cartel was involved in the crime.

“Substantial evidence supports the (lower court’s) determination and it is reasonably probable that petitioner’s penalty phase jury would have returned a verdict of life in prison without parole had it heard the evidence withheld by the prosecution,” Justice Joyce Kennard wrote for the court.

[SNIP]

As with most of California’s more than 720 death row inmates, Bacigalupo’s appeal has languished in the state Supreme Court for more than 20 years, and his case has never even reached the federal courts, where cases typically take another decade to resolve.

Proposition 34 backers say this bogged-down system has become too costly for California to maintain. But death penalty supporters argue the punishment is still justified for the state’s most heinous murderers, and that the system would cost less if the courts processed appeals more swiftly.

A FOURTH CIRCUIT JUDGE GETS FED UP

On June 19, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a sentence of life without the possibility of parole was indeed the legally correct one for Tony Gregg, a Richmond, Virginia cocaine addict and sometimes penny ante drug dealer.

The appeals court ruling came about after the federal judge who originally presided over Gregg’s trial tried to a way around the federal sentencing guidelines that mandated an automatic life sentence for a 3rd felony drug conviction. Instead, the judge attempted to reduce Gregg’s sentence to 25 years in prison.

The 4th Circuit’s three judge panel ruled that the original judge had erred by trying to reduce the sentence, and that Gregg was obliged to serve an iron clad LWOP. Period, end of story.

While the 4th Circuit’s panel was unanimous in their decision, one of the three justices, Judge Andre Davis, couldn’t let the matter go quite so simply, thus wrote his own concurring opinion—in the form of what amounts to a long Op Ed.

Davis is a skilled and impassioned writer and his essay/opinion is worth reading in its entirety. (It starts on p. 19 of the appeals ruling which you can access here.)

I’ve excerpted (and edited) some of the most relevant sections below:

The distinguished district judge was aghast that the now forty-year-old Tony Gregg would spend the rest of his life in federal prison for selling small amounts of crack cocaine over a period of several weeks out of a hotel room in a run-down section of Richmond.

[So] the judge….elected to reconvene the sentencing proceeding and to impose, instead, a twenty-five year, within Guidelines sentence. As the panel opinion makes clear, we are constrained to undo the district court’s stab at achieving a more just sentence.

The record shows that Gregg was a classic “utility player” in America’s forty-year “war on drugs”: user, seller, “snitch.” A tenth-grade drop-out (after repeating the second grade and the seventh grade) with four half-siblings, he began to use illegal narcotics in his early teens. For a time, he lived in an abusive family environment; later, he moved between his mother, grandmother, and father, sometimes in Virginia, sometimes in Ohio.

As a young man, he attempted suicide more than once (although he described the episodes as mere attempts to “get high”). Throughout his 20s and early 30s, he was in and out of jails and prisons on a regular basis, sometimes for assaultive behavior. He was convicted of illegal gun possession in 2001 and served a three-year federal prison sentence.

Later, once again released from incarceration and having adjusted reasonably well upon his return to free society, in consideration for unspecified monetary compensation, he became a highly-valued, highly-effective confidential informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Violent Crime Task Force in Richmond, on whose behalf he engaged in half a dozen undercover drug transactions from mid-2008 through early 2009.

Sometime in early 2009, during his habitual association with drug users and dealers while working on behalf of the FBI to prosecute others involved in the drug trade, Gregg fell off the wagon and began to use and sell illegal narcotics again……

…[P]rior to trial, Gregg was offered a plea agreement for a twenty-year sentence; when he rejected the government’s offer, the government went all out for the life sentence found to be unjust by the district court. Of the government’s four non-law-enforcement witnesses at the one-day trial below, all four were women who were themselves, like Gregg, users and sellers of crack cocaine and heroin who worked with Gregg to sell crack cocaine.

Understandably, perhaps, to many, Gregg is not a sympathetic figure; they will think: he got what he deserved. To many others, perhaps, matters are not so clear. Indeed, many would say that Tony Gregg seems to be one more of the drug war’s “expendables.”

This case presents familiar facts seen in courts across the country: a defendant addicted to narcotics selling narcotics in order to support his habit. Unfortunately for Gregg and countless other poorly-educated, drug-dependant offenders, current drug prosecution and sentencing policy mandates that he spend the rest of his life in prison…..

The mass incarceration of drug offenders persists into the second decade of the twenty-first century despite the fact that research consistently demonstrates that the current approach to combating illegal drug use and drug trafficking is a failure…. Even the U.S. drug czar, a position created by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, admits the war on drugs is failing, stating that after 40 years and $1 trillion, “it has not been successful … the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

I share the district judge’s dismay over the legally mandated sentence he must impose in this case. While the controlling legal principles require us to order the reimposition of a sentence of life without parole in this case, the time has long passed when policymakers should come to acknowledge the nation’s failed drug policy and to act on that acknowledgement.

As a nation, we are smart enough to do better.

(NOTE: A thank you to Doug Berman and Sentencing Law and Policy for pointing out the eloquence of Davis’s concurring opinion.)

AND ABOUT THAT DRUG WAR—40 YEARS AND A TRILLION DOLLARS LATER, THINGS HAVE GOTTEN WORSE, NOT BETTER

Now that we’re on the topic, it seems like a good time to highlight an exceptionally illuminating report on the cost/benefit of the drug war by my friend, the AP’s Martha Mendoza.

Here are a few relevant clips:

After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

This week President Obama promised to “reduce drug use and the great damage it causes” with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.

Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.

[SNIP]

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

$20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

$33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

$49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

$121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

$450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — “an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction” — cost the United States $215 billion a year.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.

“Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use,” Miron said, “but it’s costing the public a fortune.”

DID WALMART DISCRIMINATE AGAINST A MILLION WOMEN?

It’s an really, REALLY unfun month for big corporations trying to dodge lawsuits from gaggles of angry women.

First Walmart. Monday’s New York Times editorial explains the matter well.

For nine years, Wal-Mart has fought to stave off a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company has long discriminated against its female workers in pay and promotions. So far it has avoided a trial on the merits of the issue. The battleground instead is whether the million or so women who have worked for Wal-Mart since 2001 really constitute a class, which the company vigorously disputes. In 2004, a federal district court judge said they did, and in April the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling the case could proceed.

Now Wal-Mart has taken the class issue to the Supreme Court. It is probably a smart legal move, given the court’s clear tendency to rule in favor of corporations, particularly when big classes or discrimination claims are involved. We hope the court resists the temptation to toss out the case, which would force women to file lawsuits one by one. Wal-Mart’s employment practices deserve a full hearing.

Agreed.

It seems the whole thing started when nine women working for WalMart realized that they were being paid less than men who did the same work, plus the guys were being promoted more often.

A district judge who found in favor of the women noted that, according to statistics, women working in Walmarts in every region of the country were being similarly underpaid when compared to their male counterparts.

What the Supremes will have to decide is whether that means every one of the one million woman working at Walmart have been discriminated against. In other words, do the female workers at Walmart constitute a class? Or should their suits be—as a very jittery Walmart hopes—simply taken on a case by case basis.

One million women in a class action suit would make the Walmart action the largest employment discrimination lawsuit in American history—a stellar designation that Walmart would prefer to avoid.

WHICH BRINGS US TO PREMPRO—FEWER WOMEN SUING, BUT BIG POTENTIAL PAYOUTS

PremPro is the hormone replacement drug that, at one time, was the most popular on the market. It is made up of Premarin, a form of estrogen that is made from the urine of pregnant mares (gross, but there you have it), and Provera, a form of artificial progesterone.

Wyeth made Premarin, Upjohn, Provera. Wyeth eventually packaged the two together as PremPro. And, for years, doctors prescribed by the bucketful.

Around 20 years ago, however, some of the nation’s more research-savvy OB/GYNs stopped prescribing PremPro when other hormone replacements drugs were developed that more closely mimicked the body’s own original hormones, and thus were deemed safer (and had fewer side-effects).

Still the preponderance of American doctors continued to go with the familiar PremPro. To date, it is estimated around 6 million women worldwide have taken the drug.

Then in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative made headlines when they stopped a massive study (sponsored by the National Institute of Health), after they found that women in the study who took PremPro were more likely to get breast cancer than those who did not.

PremPro-taking women with breast cancer wondered if Wyeth had suspected the risks and ignored them. Lawsuits resulted. Then more lawsuits.

Pfizer bought Wyeth around a year ago (and Upjohn in 2003)– along with it, as many as 9000 lawsuits filed by women with breast cancer who claimed that PremPro was, at least in part, to blame for their illness—and that Pfizer/Wyeth hid what they knew of its dangers..

At first, Wyeth/Pfizer was able to get a bunch of suits dismissed, but now the stronger suits are arriving in court, and the tide appears to have turned.

Out of the 12 cases that have thus far gotten in front of a jury, the score is Pfizer 5, women 7. (Here’s the result of one such case from last year., in which the jury concluded that the drug company purposely hid the risk of cancer.)

At the end of last week, Pfizer settled another case before trial.

Monday, a Pennsylvania Superior Court gave plaintiffs another win when she ruled that the two-year statue of limitations for women who allege their breast cancer was caused by PremPro started, not from the day they were diagnosed with cancer, but from the day the Women’s Health Initiative study was released.

Stay tuned. This issue is far from over.

On Tuesday, lawyers for 31-year old Cameron Douglas, the son of actor Michael Douglas, cut a deal with federal prosecutors for charges that the younger Douglas had moved quite a bit of meth and some cocaine over a three year period, plus been caught with heroin when he was supposed to be under house arrest. Under federal sentencing guidelines, the minimum for a crime like his was 10 years in lock-up. Again, that’s the minimum. In a Federal District Court in Manhattan, Douglas got half that: a 5-year sentence.

The NY Times reports on the Douglas story. And here’s what the AP had to say.

So did his famous family help? Oh, sure. Of course. It is preposterous to think otherwise. More likely having a family who could afford a smart lawyer, and who also knew how to make a good emotional case in 37—count ‘em—letters of support helped the most. There are a lot of federal judges who are sick to death of handing down monster sentences to people who are addicts looking to support their habit. Douglas appeared to be dealing in more quantity than that. But the letters explained that he was a poor little, famous parent-stunted, drug-addicted rich man/boy—yadda, yadda, yadda. Or whatever it was that Michael Douglas wrote. Gee, Officer Krupke and all that. And it’s likely true.

But the sentence wasn’t entirely out of line. Surely, the judge and prosecutors cut him something of a break. But he cooperated—translation, he snitched, or tried to snitch (It isn’t quite clear). Had he been poor and a gang member, he’d have done a lot more time. I know someone of about Douglas’s age who was sentenced earlier this year and fell into precisely all the same categories as Douglas—short the famous friends and family, and stellar opportunities growing up. (He got caught dealing for a duration of several years, but was no where near top of the pile, non-violent charges, cooperated with prosecutors, I mean, unlike Douglas, he named names.) But the guy I know is a former gang member from the projects and is doing 14 years federal time (and very relieved at that sentence. He knew it could have been a lot longer). So let’s not pretend that the goddess of criminal justice is blind to influence.

Still, speaking purely personally, it is hard for me to resent the five year, cut-down jolt as I can see no particular public good served by a longer sentence. Five years means that Cameron Douglas has a chance at making a life for himself, becoming a productive tax payer and a decent man. Let’s hope he takes it.

Are there lots of instances where others are at least as deserving of that chance?

Yep.

Here’s one random example. There are many, many, many more,

The murder rate in Cuidad Juarez exceeds that of Baghdad.

And there is no one better equipped to take you to the heart of the disintegration of this once lively, now deadly city than Tuscon-based journalist/writer Charles Bowden who has been immersing himself in Cuidad Juarez off and on for 20 years.

The result is his newest book, Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields

Bowden is a dream of a prose stylist, a deep and fine cultural analyst, as well as terrifyingly gutsy as a reporter (read the chapter about his meeting with the sicario, the Mexican assassin, and you’ll understand what I mean).

For those of you interested in such matters, you have two opportunities this week to see and hear Bowden on the subject of Cuidad Juarez and his attempts to make sense of the ghastly violence running rife through this wounded and wounding city.

On Wednesday, 4/21, Bowden will be in conversation with my pal, KPCC’s Aldofo Guzman Lopez at the Los Angeles Central Library, 630 W. 5th Street, LA, 90071, at 7 p.m. (There’s no charge but reservations strongly recommended.)

AND, because this weekend is LA Times Festival of Books weekend (more on that as the week wears on, and yes you should come to the LATFOB, or you’re totally missing out and I’m really, really sad for you) Bowden is, of course, on a panel—being interviewed by none other than very good pal, Marc Cooper. The panel is on Sunday at 3 p.m. at UCLA’s Rolfe Hall. (Also free, and reservations also recommended.)

The panel, titled, Life on the Edge: Violence and the West, also features the marvelous Deanne Stillman.

PS: I will be moderating a panel of fantastically cool writers on Saturday, at 12:30 in Haines hall. So mark your calendars immediately. More about this later.

Also, my pal Tod Goldberg will be on a panel at 2 pm on Saturday at Young Hall and, since he’s much funnier than pretty much anyone I know (or anyone you know), and he’s also a wonderful fiction writer, you should go to that too, right after. (More on this later too.)

Okay, yes, yesterday was Earth Day.

But I’m sure you’ll be happy to know, that today is a National Call-In Day that is a big part of Crack the Disparity National Month of Advocacy—- a month-long coordinated push to eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

Unfortunately for the organizers—and those of us who believe this to be an important issue—”Crack the Disparity National Month of Advocacy” (CTDNMA???), just does not have the snappy ring of say….. well…Earth Day.

OR

Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day, which also occurs today.

OR

International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Okay, that has its own problems this year, I grant you—and it’s not until September anyway).

In any case, here are the instructions should you want to participate:

To participate call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard right now at 202.224.3121, and ask to speak to your representatives in the Senate and House. Urge them to support and co-sponsor H.R. 265, the Drug Sentencing Reform and Cocaine Kingpin Trafficking Act in the House and legislation in the Senate that eliminates the 100 to 1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

(I’m guessing that, if you call, given recent events, it’s probably best not to talk like a pirate…but if you call today, in addition to the above-mentioned days, it is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, which opens a host of possibilities.

And then Friday, it turns out, is National Hairball Day so if you call tomorrow you could…..

….oh, never mind. Just call.)

This is a real contender for this year’s bad judgment Olympics. How do we hate what these school administrator’s did? Let us count the ways.

Here’s the story (Jason Song of the LA Times reports):

Porter Middle School administrators believed a boy was dealing pot on campus. So they allegedly sent a student to buy some.

The sting worked — to a point. The student successfully bought drugs and the administrators at the Granada Hills campus reported the incident to authorities.

But although Los Angeles Police Department officers are investigating the suspected marijuana dealer, they also are scrutinizing the three administrators who allegedly orchestrated the buy, said Michel Moore, an LAPD deputy chief, on Wednesday.

It is a felony to ask a minor to buy drugs.

The administrators have also been reassigned by the Los Angeles Unified School District to positions away from the Granada Hills campus, which was named a California Distinguished School in 2007, while the investigation is ongoing. In a letter to parents, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said the school’s principal, an assistant principal and dean had been removed.

Thankfully, the kid whom the administrators recruited to be their narc, is not being investigated by anybody.

Read the rest.

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AND IN OTHER STUPID ADMINISTRATOR NEWS: It seems that the Corona del Mar school administrator who spiked the drama department’s idea of putting on the musical RENT has since relented.
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(Note: The kid in the photo has nothing to do with this situation. He’s just a random middleschooler.)