IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
via Op-Ed Contributor – Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? – NYTimes.com.
Abstract
There is increasing evidence that our criminal system often convicts the innocent. Criminal informants, or “snitches,” play a prominent role in this wrongful conviction phenomenon. The criminal system, however, is heavily dependent on snitches, particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of drug offenses, and police and prosecutors are often not well-positioned to know when their informants are lying. This Comment, which was prepared in connection with the ACLU of Northern California’s conference on wrongful convictions, describes the institutional relationships between snitches, police, and prosecutors that makes snitch falsehoods so pervasive and difficult to discern with the traditional tools of the adversarial process. It offers a litigation suggestion for providing a judicial check on the use of unreliable informant witnesses, namely, a Daubert-style pre-trial reliability hearing. The Appendix provides a sample motion requesting and justifying such a hearing.
via SSRN-Beyond Unreliable: How Snitches Contribute to Wrongful Convictions by Alexandra Natapoff.
- Time to Legalize Drugs? (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)
- Drug War Quiz in Mother Jones (boingboing.net)
- DNA Test=FAIL (meganmcardle.theatlantic.com)
Full Article
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
Full article
For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.
Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.
Full article
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – American drug users are paying ruthless Mexican kingpins nearly $14 billion annually for their meth, heroin, cocaine and especially marijuana – monies that are helping fund an unprecedented bloody turf war that’s threatening Mexican institutions, the White House drug czar said.
John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said marijuana, not heroin or cocaine, is the “bread and butter,” “the center of gravity” for Mexican drug cartels that every year smuggle tons of it through the porous U.S.-Mexico border.
Of the $13.8 billion that Americans contributed to Mexican drug traffickers in 2004-05, about 62 percent, or $8.6 billion, comes from marijuana consumption.
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