[51724] in Cypherpunks
Re: Another Motivation for the CDA (Federal Sentencing Guid
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Sat Mar 9 01:16:55 1996
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 1996 21:59:00 -0800
To: jamesd@echeque.com
From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
At 07:33 PM 3/8/96 -0800, jamesd wrote:
>Also he did not steal the pizza. He destroyed it in the course of
>intimidating some kids who were eating pizza.
>
>In theory one would expect the law to have this unjust effect,
>but in practice most of the poster boys that people give as
>examples of the injustice of this law are folk that one would
>like to see taken behind a barn and shot out of hand.
The pizza guy was a thug, but twice as many third-strikers got
their third strike for marijuana as for all violent crimes combined.
I assume most of these had large quantities, possibly intended for sale,
and a number of them had real crimes as their previous felonies
rather than Prohibition-related offenses. But you can get legally
serious quantities of marijuana by just growing a couple of plants.
>Perhaps the prosecutors are exercising prosecutorial discretion?
Not much - Government Radio said tonight that they're not allowed to
plea-bargain third strike felonies down to misdemeanors. The LA public
defender's office is absolutely swamped, partly because third-strike
cases are supposed to get diligent support, and partly because they
have to go to trial rather than plea-bargaining a guilty, which is less work.
The county jails are also having serious crowding problems, because
prospective third-strikers are being kept in them pending trial
to avoid risk of flight, so non-third-strike jailees are getting out
early (especially drug violators.)
And the guys who just got busted for having fertilizer, diesel oil,
and drugs on their farm had a whole three ounces of marijuana and
personal-use quantities of crank. Maybe they were planning to blow up
buildings rather than stumps; but the Feds are trying to paint them
as max evil just to build up their case.
#--
# Thanks; Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281
# "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened
# to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media
# generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and
# social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who
# exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...
