Banish the Snitch from the American Justice System
People in this country are wrongfully convicted on a daily basis. Whether it be inaccurate information, botched crime scenes, or blatant lies by police informants, all kinds of people from all walks of life have found themselves the recipient of another person's sentence.The cases where people are wrongfully convicted of drug charges never hit the mainstream media as there is too much hype surrounding the multitude of recent murder and rape conviction exonerations. Those wrongful convictions are usually based on a mistaken identity or inability of the defendant to provide an alibi. Wrongful convictions of the drug type are sinister on the other hand, with evidence being cooked up by users in fear of their own eventual punishment.
Drug use and abuse is a family and social matter that only complicates our justice system. Utilization of informants who in the "interview" room are already envisioning their next high as they drop dime after dime against so-called connects and contacts is a joke; especially when there is no guarantee the gun-toting public servant overseeing the interview isn't corrupt himself. I think we all know what you get when you put a crackhead facing even the most trivial amount of time behind bars in the same room as a dirty cop being pressed by his superiors to Bust, Bust, Bust! -- an absolute mockery of what our country's forefathers had envisioned for the justice system. The article below is a fine representation of this.
Written by Scott Morgan of StoptheDrugWar.org
In an effort to protect our society from drugs, we've created laws that endanger everyone:
A federal judge decided Tuesday to free 15 men from prison because their convictions were based on testimony of a government informant who lied on the witness stand and framed innocent people.
Collectively, the men have served at least 30 years behind bars…
The case is a blow to the federal justice system, which relies heavily on informant-based testimony, lawyers said. The men, some with no prior run-ins with the law, were given long prison sentences based almost exclusively on the word of informant Jerrell Bray and Lee Lucas, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who supervised Bray. [Cleveland Plain Dealer]
Stories like this emerge regularly, and yet one can only imagine how many such travesties of justice will never come to light. The process is so simple: informant makes up stories to get himself out of trouble, someone else get in trouble, informant doesn't. You couldn't design a more efficient system for collecting innocent people and tossing them behind bars.
The 15 innocent people that will now be set free are incredibly lucky (if you wanna call it that) that the people who set them up happened to be exposed as serial liars. That is really the only thing you can hope for when your conviction resulted from a conspiracy between shady snitches and dirty drug cops.
This is what you get when you pull back the curtain and behold the drug war for what it truly is and not what it is supposed to be. The Drug Czar with all his tricky talking points and misleading rhetoric can’t and won't ever attempt to defend injustice such as this. But it is that very same anti-drug propaganda that has served to blind our eyes and deafen our ears to the sickening unfairness that characterizes the practical application of these brutal laws.
When one comes to appreciate the totality of the lies, errors, and overkill that are inevitably included in the drug war package deal, it ceases to even matter what one thinks about drugs. This war would be a disaster even if it worked the ways it's supposed to. But it doesn't. And it never will. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)
7 comments:
This is a great post. Thanks. And...the prison system is a for-profit industry. This administration has been known to feed corporate interests. Nothing will change until that fact is changed.
Great post!
The phony war on drugs in South America is played out in the citys of the States, where small users are picked on as the small farmers in Columbia etc are. The Authorities never go after the main people just the easy targets.
Since the ousting of the Taliban in Afganistan poppy production has trebbled and the US army are allowing it to leave, to flood the markets in Europe and the states.
And yes the prisons are quite happy to make lots of profit as small time users
Are passed through its system.
Stop the phony drug war at home and abroad.
good stuff here. i think you're pretty much spot on. the only reason drugs are so lucrative is BECAUSE of the drug war. for example every time there is a seizure the drug dealers are celebrating along with the cops because prices go up.
also because drugs are illegal the dealers cant insure their product, so violence and threats have to be used instead. legalization would allow legitimate tactics to be used in place of violence.
the illegality of drugs is what entices many people to start in the first place, i know i did for that reason. in holland where cannabis is legal, young people's attitudes are very different. they see no reason to smoke it, there's no point really. you can buy it in shops, so why bother? nobody minds, where's the fun in that?
crimes committed to pay for drugs add weight to the argument that drugs ruin lives, or do they? the drug war is what ruins lives. forcing drugs underground CAUSES people to have to commit crimes to afford them. when cocaine, opium, cannabis, amphetamines etc. were legal, their usage and price were much lower than today. outlawing something is the surest way to increase its cost, appeal, level of abuse and crime associated with it.
the war on drugs CAUSES the problem, it is not the solution. unfortunately the mindset of the people who make the rules is too fixed and i doubt we will ever see the mass legalization of drugs to any meaningful extent.
thank you for sending me this article. Our forefathers are no doubt doing cartwheels in their graves at the injustices that occur in our country. Innocent people being imprisoned is a serious matter. If we want change in this country we must speak out against travesties such as these.
Let's not fool ourselves, though, that this is limited to drug cases. Across the country, innocent men sit on death row, or have been released after years on death row, or have been executed before the truth came out because of this very kind of conviction.
I respect your opinion, but writing as someone in the criminal justice field, I don't want to say in what capacity, this is only one side of the issue. One person's "snitch" is another person's informant. You take the position that a "snitch" is always someone who is lying for alterior motives. You also (in a wise choice to defend your position) choose to limit the argument to the "drug war."
One thing that people who are not in the business of detecting, solving and prosecuting crimes fail to realize is that life is not like CSI. Oftentimes the only evidence is in the form of a witness. The credibility of these witnesses is often not the best, but neither is the credibility of the accused.
I am not saying it is right, but estimates place the actual number of crimes that are even detected at only between 10 percent and 20 percent and that only 5 percen of our American population commit 90 percent of the crimes. Often todays victim was yeterday's crminal. These are the lives that are chosen. Whether or not an individual is guilty of the crime they are accused of in a particular case is of little consequence if they have committed numerous undetected crimes in the past. This may not be the most legally sound argument, but neither is labeling people who assist law enforcement as "snitches."
Just presenting another side of the argument for you.
-Ben
Which is worse a snitch or a dishonest victim/witness and unethical prosecutors and judges?
In the Texas justice system, and particularly in Dallas County, there are many examples of the fundamental unfairness, class discrimination, blatant racism, police, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct and repeated human/civil rights violations that take place daily. No better example of this is the arrest, indictments and prosecution of Lakeith Amir-Sharif on charges that lack a factual basis and are based solely on sloppy police and prosecution investigations, questionable acts by judges, and the knowingly perjured testimony of a angry, vindictive, and heart broken ex-girlfriend named Cathy Jonette Hawkins. Now this case like the majority of criminal cases prosecuted inside Dallas Country “does not” involve DNA, so any reforms of our criminal justice system must take this fact under consideration when trying to address the larger problems that affect the justice system. There is a greater possibility of an innocent person being convicted in a non-DNA cases than if there is DNA available. A casual review of the facts and circumstances surrounding of Sharif's charges will leave you wondering why has the D.A. Watkins has continued to prosecute this innocent man; and at the expense to taxpayers that exceeds two hundred fifty thousand dollars ($250,000.00).
http://dallassouthblog.com/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q4bmYb8JLQI&feature=related
www.angelfire.com/crazy4/texas/craigwatkins.html
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