Pubdate: Fri, 25 Jun 2010
Source: Ft. Worth Star-Telegram (TX)
Copyright: 2010 Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Contact: http://www.star-telegram.com/submit-a-letter/
Website: http://www.star-telegram.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/162
Author: Leonard Pitts

THE NEW JIM CROW BY MICHELLE ALEXANDER, A MUST READ

“You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the
blacks.

The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not
appearing to.” — Richard Nixon as quoted by H.R. Haldeman, supporting
a get-tough-on drugs strategy.

“They give black people time like it’s lunch down there. You go down
there looking for justice, that’s what you find: just us.” — Richard
Pryor.

Michelle Alexander was an ACLU attorney in Oakland, preparing a racial
profiling lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol. The ACLU had
put out a request for anyone who had been profiled to get in touch.
One day, in walked this black man.

He was maybe 19 and toted a thick sheaf of papers, what Alexander
calls an “incredibly detailed” accounting of at least a dozen police
stops over a nine-month period, with dates, places and officers’
names. This was, she thought, a “dream plaintiff.”

But it turned out he had a record, a drug felony — and she told him
she couldn’t use him; the state’s attorney would eat him alive. He
insisted he was innocent, said police had planted drugs and beaten
him. But she was no longer listening. Finally, enraged, he snatched
the papers back and started shredding them.

“You’re no better than the police,” he cried. “You’re doing what they
did to me!” The conviction meant he couldn’t work or go to school, had
to live with his grandmother. Did Alexander know how that felt? And
she wanted a dream plaintiff? “Just go to my neighborhood,” he said.
“See if you can find one black man my age they haven’t gotten to already.”

She saw him again a couple of months later. He gave her a potted plant
from his grandmother’s porch — he couldn’t afford flowers — and
apologized. A few months after that, a scandal broke: Oakland police
officers accused of planting drugs and beating up innocent victims.
One of the officers involved was the one named by that young man.

“It was,” says Alexander now, more than 10 years later, “the beginning
of me asking some hard questions of myself as a civil rights lawyer.
What is actually going on in his neighborhood? How is it that
they’ve already gotten to all the young African-American men in his
neighborhood? I began questioning my own assumptions about how the
criminal justice system works.”

[snip]

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n489/a05.html

This film shows the hypocrisy of politicians who remain silent on the issue of drugs despite their own experiences and, more importantly, despite the fact people are executed to commemorate World Drugs Day.

Jamaican gangster and drug kingpin Christopher “Dudus” Coke, subject of a violent month-long manhunt in the slums of West Kingston, surrendered to authorities on Wednesday without a shot being fired. He happened to be dressed as a woman at the time, police gleefully announced, providing photo evidence — a darkly comic anticlimax to a senseless battle that killed 73 people and wounded 35 more. It’s no exaggeration to say that drug consumers in the world’s leading nations have blood on their hands. Their presidents and prime ministers have more.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/24/chris-selley-our-indefensibly-blood-soaked-drug-laws/#ixzz0rob7tI38

Pubdate: Tue, 15 Jun 2010
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: A20
Webpage: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/us/15scotus.html
Copyright: 2010 The New York Times Company
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Adam Liptak
Referenced: the Supreme Court decision
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/09-60.pdf
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/deportation

JUSTICES EASE DEPORTATION RULE IN MINOR DRUG CASES

WASHINGTON — Immigrants who are legally in the United States need
not be automatically deported for minor drug offenses, the Supreme
Court ruled Monday in a unanimous decision.

Lower courts had said that Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo, a permanent
resident of the United States who had lived here since 1983, when he
was 5, was subject to mandatory deportation for a second drug
offense, this one involving possession of single tablet of a prescription drug.

The question in the case was whether that second offense amounted to
an “aggravated felony.” If it did, the government had no choice but
to deport him under the immigration laws. If it did not, the attorney
general had the discretion to show leniency.

In 2004, Mr. Carachuri-Rosendo was sentenced by a Texas state court
judge to 20 days in jail for possession of less than two ounces of
marijuana. The next year, he was sentenced to 10 days in jail for
having a single tablet of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, without a prescription.

Those were both misdemeanors under state law. But federal authorities
argued that a second drug offense counted as an aggravated felony
under federal law, making Mr. Carachuri-Rosendo ineligible for
discretionary relief from deportation.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for seven justices, said the
interactions of the various state and federal laws in the case
required analysis of a “maze of statutory cross-references” and a
2006 decision, Lopez v. Gonzales, that rooted the definition of
“aggravated felony” in federal law even when state offenses were involved.

At bottom, Justice Stevens wrote, “a 10-day sentence for the
unauthorized possession of a trivial amount of a prescription drug”
is at odds with the ordinary meaning of “aggravated felony,” even if
federal prosecutors could, in theory, have sought a two-year sentence
in federal court for the second drug offense.

“Carachuri-Rosendo, and others in his position, may now seek
cancellation of removal and thereby avoid the harsh consequence of
mandatory removal,” Justice Stevens wrote. But “any relief he may
obtain depends upon the discretion of the attorney general.”

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in separate
concurrences, voted with the majority but declined to adopt its
reasoning in the case, Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder, No. 09-60.

[snip]