Radley Balko outlines the collateral damage from the War on Drugs in a new article at Culture 11.

Prohibition militarizes police, enriches our enemies, undermines our laws, and condemns our sick to suffering.

There's also the enormous economic cost of prosecution and imprisonment and, as Radley points out: [More...]

There's a heated--yet very unenlightening--debate happening in the blogosphere about the shooting of an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant III by transit police in Oakland, California.

At The Daily Beast, Stanley Crouch writes that "the left" isn't outraged by black on black crime but police brutality instead. Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates is outraged at the outrage from those who think that blacks aren't sufficiently outraged by black on black crime. Writes Coates:

"I spent most of last year following Bill Cosby around to standing room only rallies in Detroit, Birmingham and Baltimore, talking to people who were pissed off by a variety of social maladies. Number one amongst them all -- the murder rate among black men."

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Local governments generally deny that they use traffic tickets to raise revenue, but two economists who reviewed tickets issued in North Carolina drew conclusions that tend to confirm a common suspicion: traffic tickets are more about generating dollars than public safety.

Traffic tickets go up significantly when local government revenue falls, they found. Their study showed for the first time evidence of how "local governments behave, in part, as though traffic tickets are a revenue tool to help offset periods of fiscal distress." ...

Controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year, a statistically significant connection.

Rising unemployment rates also correlate with increased ticketing. As the recession pinches local budgets, expect more traffic citations to be issued. The lesson: drive carefully, don't roll through stop signs, and invest in a good radar detector.

Harris County, Texas recently elected its first female district attorney. As a former judge, she seems to understand of the importance of fair trials to criminal defendants.

She said her first priority will be a new policy to prevent tragedies like the wrongful conviction of Ricardo Rachell. He spent five years in prison for a sexual assault of a child that he didn’t commit. Attorneys neglected to test DNA evidence that was available at the time of his trial.

"It's going to be an open-file policy, so the defense attorney will be aware of all the evidence," Lykos said. "That’s only fair. If there is scientific evidence there to be tested, we’ll see and be sure that it will be tested."

Bravo. Open discovery should be the rule, not the exception. It seems that Lykos will be a giant step up from her predecessor.

After John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh doesn't seem so bad. Sure, he didn't think that federal prosecutors should play by the same ethical standards that bind defense attorneys. Yes, he rabidly fought the drug war. But at least he didn't run the entire Constitution through a paper shredder. And unlike Gonzales, who took instruction from Karl Rove, Thornburgh was once sued by Rove.

In yesterday's New York Times, Thornburgh argues that white collar criminals deserve to be prosecuted, and urges the Obama administration to hire more FBI agents and prosecutors, but not to change any laws. He has it just about backwards.

Thornburgh seems to understand the problem. [more ....]

MADD scores a round in Illinois. As a result of their efforts, first time DUI offenders will have 14 days to install a "breath-alcohol ignition-interlock device" in the dashboard of their car.

With the device, if a driver has a blood-alcohol content above 0.024, the engine won't start....Drivers who register a 0.08 or higher blood-alcohol level at the time of their arrest will be required to drive with the monitoring devices for five months. Drivers who refuse alcohol testing but are convicted must use the devices for 11 months.

....The gadgets also will require drivers be tested periodically while the car is running. Drivers will have to blow into the device again within the first 5 to 15 minutes of a trip, then at least twice every hour.

More...

Does it really take an investigation to answer the big question here?

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday night that it had missed repeated opportunities to discover what may be the largest financial fraud in history, a Ponzi scheme whose losses could run as high as $50 billion. The commission said it received credible allegations about the scheme at least nine years ago and will immediately open an internal investigation to examine why it had failed to pursue them aggressively.

SEC Chair Christopher Cox is astonished to learn that the commission failed to respond aggressively to allegations of Wall Street executive Bernard Madoff's "financial wrongdoing." He shouldn't be. The regulatory philosophy of the Bush administration (regulators should be helpful, not adversarial, in their oversight of the regulated industry) has always been an excuse for lax enforcement -- and it's a philosophy Cox embraced. That's why President Bush gave him his job.

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Amnesty International, USA has released a new report on police use of tasers. 334 people have now died from being tasered. The report finds 90% were unnarmed. CA and FL are the states with the most deaths, while Phoenix and Las Vegas have the highest death rates among cities.

The report says police should suspend the use of taser guns.

Amnesty International’s report -- which includes a study of 98 autopsies that were independently reviewed by a forensic pathologist -- found that 90 percent of those who died after being struck with tasers were unarmed and many did not appear to present a serious threat. Police officers used tasers on schoolchildren, pregnant women and even an elderly person with dementia. More than 30 individuals died after being shocked in jails, where tasers are also widely used, or in the booking area of police stations after they were already under police control.

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Good probation officers help offenders avoid a return to criminal behavior by assisting their efforts to find housing, jobs, mental health care, and substance abuse treatment. Bad probation officers do everything they can to get offenders revoked so they have one less person to supervise. Good or bad, probation officers who provide meaningful supervision of probationers help protect the community.

That's why it's short-sighted for states like Arizona, in their efforts to cope with budget deficits, to cut probation staffs.

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In today's New York Times, Seth Lipsky defends President Clinton's decision to pardon Marc Rich (an issue receiving fresh scrutiny in light of Eric Holder's involvement). His central argument -- that using RICO to prosecute accusations of tax evasion is an abuse of RICO that the Justice Department ended six years after Rich's indictment -- echoes (and relies upon) Bill Clinton's explanation for the pardon.

Lipsky's reasoning is sound if not fully persuasive. The aggressive expansion of RICO to prosecute persons who were not part of a criminal organization (as opposed to a business organization that committed tax crimes) stretched the law beyond the uses that Congress envisioned. The question is why Rich (who departed the country before his indictment) received the benefit of that merciful reasoning while other RICO defendants who were similarly situated did not. There is more to that story than Lipsky reveals.

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A statistical report from TRAC on federal prosecutions is out. It covers the month of August, 2008. It begins:

Greetings from TRAC. The latest available data from the Justice Department show that in August 2008 the government reported 13,566 new prosecutions. While down slightly (2.3%) from the previous month, this number is still 43% higher than a year ago. The overall growth in federal prosecutions is largely driven by continuing increases in immigration matters, which accounted for 54% of all new cases filed in August in U.S. Federal Court.

As for all prosecutions:

The largest number of prosecutions of these matters in August 2008 was for "Immigration", accounting for 54.4 percent of prosecutions. Prosecutions were also filed for "Drugs-Drug Trafficking" (14.1%), " Weapons-Operation Triggerlock Major" (5.7%), "Other Criminal Prosecutions" (3.3%), "Drugs-Organized Crime Task Force" (3.1%), "Assimilated Crimes" (2.8%), "Withheld by Govt from TRAC (FOIA challen" (2.7%), "Other-Not Specified" (2.2%). See Figure 2.

Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of NORML, takes a hard look at President-Elect Barack Obama's appointment announcements to date and finds them not a good sign for those seeking marijuana law reform.

While we've documented likely Attorney General nominee Eric Holder and VP-Elect Joe Biden previously (Also see NNDB and Radley Balko here), Allen points out three other stumbling blocks: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, ONDCP Transition Team Director Dr. Don Vereen and likely Drug Czar Former Congressman James Ramstad.

In an e-mail, Allen tries to put some optimism in the picture: [More...]