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Don't Declare Defeat Yet In Drug War
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Published: March 16, 2008
All good things must come to an end, and so it was last Sunday with "The Wire," the best show on TV for the last five seasons.
The HBO series that centered on a group of Baltimore police officers - along with the criminals, politicians and bureaucrats they had to deal with - was superlative drama that comes along every decade or so. It alone was worth my huge cable bill.
"The Wire" gave us insight into the war on drugs from the perspective of both the cops and prosecutors charged with fighting it and the assembly line of street-level dealers, drug lords and addicts who make it necessary. Now in a Time magazine article, the show's six writers are advocating a controversial method for ending the drug war: jury nullification.
"What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has," they wrote. "And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass."
As a result, "If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented."
No Place To Protest Laws
This really hit home to me because when I served on a jury three years ago, we did acquit a guy charged with delivery of a controlled substance - four "dime bags" of marijuana. The six of us weren't trying to make a political statement; we just felt there was reasonable doubt about his guilt.
As I sat in a Hillsborough County courtroom with jury pool members, the prosecution and defense teams proceeded to explain the case we would be dealing with and whether we could put aside our personal feelings on drug laws and impartially render a verdict. Some admitted they would have a hard time doing that, since they considered the substance involved to be low on the list of dangers to the public. One woman angrily screamed, "There's murderers, rapists and robbers out there, and you brought us down here for this?!"
The prosecutor then told the lady that if she had problems with drug laws, she should make them known to lawmakers, and that the courtroom was not the place to protest state statutes.
"The Wire" writers, however, feel that jury nullification is a "legitimate protest" against unjust laws. Maybe, but if their show proved anything, the "victimless crime" of drug dealing produces a lot of indirect victims.
Who Are Drug War Victims?
When you have guys standing on the corner selling drugs, you can forget about any private investment in the surrounding neighborhood. Law-abiding citizens become prisoners in their homes, and turf wars lead to violent deaths. Letting all violators of drug laws off the hook won't change those side effects.
And what about the people addicted to illegal narcotics and the effect their addiction has on their families? Bubbles, the series' resident addict, gave us an all-too-real depiction of how drugs can destroy lives and communities.
Maybe the war on drugs has been a failure, but we shouldn't just declare defeat and withdraw the troops. Like any war, when you're losing, you need to come up with a winnable strategy.
Unfortunately, that probably won't happen anytime soon. A fellow officer giving a eulogy at a mock wake for Jimmy McNulty, who ended up leaving the force, probably summed it up best in "The Wire"'s final episode: "He learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes."
Joseph H. Brown is a Tribune editorial writer.
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Reader Comments
Posted by ( JackNelsonSteward ) on March 16, 2008 at 9:06 a.m. ( Suggest removal )
How odd, Joe. You acknowledge the show's value and the insight it offers. Then disagree with the conclusions of those who wrote it. I would suggest that if there was any real insight at all offered by the show it is that the "War on Drugs" has produced more casualties on both sides than the drugs themselves.
But, it's fiction anyway.
"Like any war, when you're losing, you need to come up with a winnable strategy." ... It is the attitude that kept us stuck in 'Nam, and has us mired in the Middle East. Of course these are actual wars, not social progams. The principle is the same: You can only come up with a "winning strategy" if you have picked a winnable fight.
In the last ninety years, if we have demonstrated anything, it is that the "War on Drugs" isn't winnable. We tried "Prohibition" and created one of the largest industries in the country: Bootlegging. We removed the production of liquor from proper regulation and killed who knows how many with alcohol manufactured in who knows what manner containing who knew what poisons (in addition to the alcohol itself). We finally realized the war was unwinnable and called it off.
The "War on Drugs" has created a precise clone of all that, but it has gone on for two generations and even more of the bitter result has manifest.
The ills you cite are real, and: Every one of them can be either eliminated or improved by removing the legal sanctions against drugs. It is a decriminalization, not an endorsement.
Those guys on the corners go away. No black market, no black market prices, no black market struggles. Those people who are addicted can get treatment and even, if they choose, continue to use the substances without becoming statistics in the legal system. Some people will continue to use their drugs of choice. I think it's a poor choice, and I don't see the point in throwing them into the privatized hell of the prison system for it. Speaking of which: The prison system, now jammed and insane, stops being a warehouse for people whose only acts have been self medication on subtances deemed illegal.
When you've picked an unwinnable fight, sometimes the only "winning strategy" is to stop the war.
If we redirected the time and money we now are spending on law enforcement and imprisonment to education and treatment, our efforts would be better rewarded and our money better spent.
It is hard to realize, then admit, that something you have invested so heavily in has failed. It is especially hard when what you have been trying to eliminate offends your moral sensibilities. We are now at the time when it is fitting to realize that the "War on Drugs" is, indeed a failure and that a "winning strategy" is to stop this insanity and approach the problem in a different way.
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Posted by ( geriler ) on March 16, 2008 at 3:08 p.m.
(This comment was removed by the site staff.)
Posted by ( KHenry ) on March 17, 2008 at 7:35 p.m. ( Suggest removal )
Joseph,
Your statement that jury nullification is a "controversial method" is true today but it has deep roots into history. Indeed, the entire basis of the western system of justice and common law is based on the Magna Carta, a document which grants the jury the right to determine the validity of a law, it's execution and the punishment applied to violators.
In America, jury nullification has historically been presented in court as a duty of the jury. To quote John Adams on the nature of the juror, "it is not only his right, but his duty – to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
It was only during the the Civil War, when many northern jurors acquitted obviously guilty abolitionists accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Laws, that courts stopped informing the jurors of their right to nullify. While the court may have obscured this right from the jury it didn't remove that right or the jury's ability to use it.
As for the "controversial" use to end the War on Drugs, there are a number of historical precedents from the Prohibition Era (aka the War on Booze) when alcohol smugglers, retailers, consumers and other violators of the Volstead Act were acquitted despite obvious guilt. Indeed, this ongoing nullification of the law is often cited as one of the principal reasons for it's repeal.
Rather than buy into the notion that jury nullification is a questionable and controversial act, I would suggest you look into the historical use of nullification and how it functions as a barrier to prosecutorial excess and ill functioning laws. I would then suggest you ask yourself, why are juries not informed of their rights, or even told to act in opposition of those rights when judging a case.
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Posted by ( geriler ) on March 26, 2008 at 7:43 a.m. ( Suggest removal )
Amen to Mr. Stewart and his call for a new approach.
Some things to consider:
- Our Land of the Free incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country, even Russia or China, according to a UN report on global incarceration rates.
- One in 20 babies born today will be incarcerated at some point in their life according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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Are our citizens so terrible or are our laws misguided? Thanks to the “tough, but not smart on crime” mentality of too many legislators, I would say the latter.
Despite all this incarceration, drugs are cheaper & more available than ever. More people than ever have substance abuse problems. It's not working. A lucrative & dangerous black market has sprung up to fill demand, as with Prohibition, which also failed.
Mandatory minimums tie the hands of neutral judges & put sentencing decisions in the hands of not-neutral prosecutors.
One-size-fits-all justice doesn’t fit anyone. We need judges to consider the history, cirumstances & degree of involvement of each defendent.
Consider the 17 year old kid in MA now serving a 2 year mandatory minimum sentence for selling a joint to a persistent undercover officer a block from a closed, church-basement preschool. He thought, Hey, I can go buy a burrito with the ten bucks! Even the DA, who insisted on pursuing the enhanced school zone charge acknowledged the kid wasn’t “a dealer”. Business owners in the small rural town had complained about teens hanging out. So 18 kids there faced 2 year mandatory minimums.
An organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has even been formed by current & former police and probation officers, prosecutors, DEA agents and judges who recognize the failures and dangers of the war on drugs.
Violent crimes, drug-related or not, certainly need to be addressed through the criminal justice system.
Addictions need to be shifted to the medical system.
It's ironic that Gov. Crist is unwilling to revisit drug laws, even as other headlines scream that services will have to be cut in FL.
There is simply no way the results of the current approach have justified the costs. An objective cost-benefit analysis would no doubt be eye-watering.
I say thank goodness for jury nullification & for jurors with the wisdom and courage to know when it is warranted. I wish more jurors would resist prosecutors' attempts to intimidate them into ignoring their consciences.
It’s cheap to incarcerate in FL today, if the $19K figure I’ve seen mentioned is accurate. Just wait till you catch up to Massachusetts where it costs $50K per year per inmate.
Hold on to your wallets, FL taxpayers!
Signed, a 51 year old, conservative, middle-class, non-drug-using wife & mother who grew up in FL.
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