The ACLU and Students for Sensible Drug Policy are filing a federal lawsuit today against the Department of Education and Secretary Margaret Spellings. The suit challenges the constitutionality of the law that strips college financial aid from students with drug convictions. The New York Times wrote about it here.

The policy has already derailed or destroyed the academic careers of nearly 200,000 would-be students since being enacted in 2000. Drug offenders are the only class of people automatically denied aid - murderers, rapists, arsonists, burglars, etc are still eligible.

A full copy of ACLU/SSDP's complaint is on the site, for your perusal.

Most importantly, they are looking to find more plaintiffs for this class action lawsuit. More information on the case is on their site.

The town of Covington, Kentucky is bucking the national trend and has rejected a bill that would limit sex offenders from living there.

It may seem that every time a legislators proposes to restrict sex offenders, the measures passes, but it doesn't always turn out that way. A proposal to ban registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of Covington, Ky., schools and day care centers is dead after local residents overwhelmingly spoke against it last night, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer. More than 300 people packed an elementary school gym for a hearing; all but a few of the 33 speakers opposed the distance restrictions.

Critics said the proposed 2,000-foot restriction would essentially drive registered sex offenders from the city's urban core into a handful of neighborhoods, including one that boasts affordable housing and is populated by young families with children. Several cited studies from other states showing that similar restrictions have led to more sex offenders failing to register. Attorney Steven Johnson-Grove said 80 to 90 percent of sex offenses are committed against children by trusted adults, not strangers.

Banishment laws are counterproductive and short-sighted. They are not the solution. TChris has an excellent take on them here.

by TChris

A panel convened by People Against Injustice in New Haven asked whether the drug war is really a race war. There's little dispute that the drug war has had a disproportionate impact on nonwhite offenders.

[W]hile black and Latino men make up just 6 percent of the state's population, they comprise more than 70 percent of the prison population. Is that because they are more criminal?

Not really, said Cliff Thornton, director of Efficacy, a drug reform group in Hartford and Green Party candidate for governor. "Blacks and whites are arrested on drug charges in equal numbers," he said, "but at every stage in the criminal justice process, the ratio of people of color who are caught in the system goes up."

The BBC reports on a new study that finds people with a certain gene variation are more likely to become dependent upon cocaine.

The Institute of Psychiatry has ... identified a gene variation where cocaine would more markedly inhibit a protein that controls removal of key mood chemical dopamine in the brain. Two copies of the variant made people 50% more likely to be cocaine abusers.

The details:

[Cocaine's] key effect is that it strongly inhibits the action of a protein - DAT - which controls removal of excess dopamine from the junctions between nerve cells in the brain. This leads to nerve cells effectively being overloaded with dopamine, which is thought to contribute to the "high" associated with taking cocaine.

Not everyone is touting the study:

by TChris

The company that makes the Intoxylizer -- a breath testing device that's popular with law enforcement agencies -- refuses to release the source code to lawyers who want to verify the machine's accuracy. The company's unwillingness to give lawyers a behind-the-scenes look at the machine's workings may imperil DUI prosecutions that depend on a breath test.

The company that makes the Intoxilyzer refused to reveal the computer source code for its machine because it was a trade secret. A county judge [in Florida] tossed out [an] alcohol breath test - a crucial piece of evidence in a DUI case - and the ruling was upheld by an appeals court in 2004.

Since then, DUI suspects in Florida, New York, Nebraska and elsewhere have mounted similar challenges. Many have won or have had their DUI charges reduced to lesser offenses. The strategy could affect thousands of the roughly 1.5 million DUI arrests made each year in the United States, defense lawyers say.

Via the Peacock Report:

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has chosen Hawaii as the venue for its annual International Narcotics Enforcement Management Seminar, a 20-day conference that in the past had been held in Washington, D.C. According to a call for bids released yesterday, the State Dept.-funded event will take place at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu as well as at an unspecified hotel in Waikiki.

....U.S. taxpayers will foot the bill for 12 hotel suites for unnamed VIPs from May 28 to June 16, when the event will conclude with a U.S. government-funded and catered "graduation dinner for approximately 40 people."

The latest driving under the influence craze is upon us. Driving while Ambien'ed. I've heard of sleep-eating while Ambien'ed and amnesia from Ambien, but sleep-driving? Apparently, it's happening more and more.

Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug. In some state toxicology laboratories Ambien makes the top 10 list of drugs found in impaired drivers.

26.5 million Ambien scripts are written every year.

Ambien's maker, Sanofi-Aventis, says the drug's record after 13 years of use in this country shows it is safe when taken as directed. ...A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said the drug's current label warnings, which say it should not be used with alcohol and in some cases could cause sleepwalking or hallucinations, were adequate.

The Justice Department now has two units targeting pimps-- the Human Trafficking Task Force and the Innocence Lost initiative. It has initiated 140 investigations in 14 cities and convicted 14 pimps.

The first pimp tried in the District under the federal statute, Carlos Curtis, will be sentenced March 17. He could face life in prison for prostituting a 12-year-old runaway he recruited from New York and a 17-year-old he brought to the District from Maryland.

In New York, James Colliton, the lawyer nick-named the "Lolita Lawyer", who until his firing last week was a partner at the swanky firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore earing $500k a year, is charged in state court and faces 7 years for allegedly "pimping out" two sisters, age 13 and 15.

If you're not watching the Oscars tonight, or if you have a tivo, check out 60 Minutes' airing of The Prince of Pot.

A Canadian who calls himself the "Prince of Pot" could wind up in a U.S. prison for life for selling marijuana seeds, but says he would be "blessed" because such a plight could help legalize the drug. ....The last place he wants to be is in jail, but Emery says if the Canadian courts allow the U.S. government to extradite him and a U.S. jury puts him away, he still sees a silver lining.

"I am blessed by what the DEA has done," he tells Simon. "I would rather see marijuana legalized than me being saved from a U.S. jail. I hope that if I am incarcerated, I can influence tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young people to take up my cause."

An interview with Marc Emery is here. He wrote about his plight here. Background is here.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees public trials. But a recent investigation by the Associated Press has found that 5,000 defendants who passed through the federal courts had the details of their cases kept from public view.

At the request of the AP, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts conducted its first tally of secrecy in federal criminal cases. The nationwide data it provided the AP showed 5,116 defendants whose cases were completed in 2003, 2004 and 2005, but the bulk of their records remain secret.

On the one hand, there is good reason for this. Most of these defendants cooperated with the Government for a lesser sentence and provided information about confederates and other wrongdoers. If this information was not sealed, they would be in physical danger when they arrive at their designated prisons. No matter what you think of the system that allows defendants to purchase their freedom through ratting out others, they should not be placed in physical danger.

LA Police Chief Bill Bratton has joined the effort to reform three-strikes laws in California by requiring the third strike to be a serious or violent crime.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who is pushing a ballot initiative to soften the tough law, said at a news conference Thursday that he had won the chiefs' backing....Cooley has long criticized the breadth of the state's law, which sometimes results in sentences of 25 years to life for those whose third strikes were nonviolent or minor crimes. His ballot initiative, coauthored with defense lawyer Brian Dunn, would limit third strikes in most cases to violent or serious offenses.

Bratton, through a spokesman, called the proposal "a balanced approach that will benefit the criminal justice system without jeopardizing public safety."

The reform would be via a ballot initiative put to California's voters in November. This is good for Bratton and good for Californians. The voters passed three-strikes in 1994, and likely never intended it to be used to impose life sentences on those whose third strikes were minor shoplifting type offenses.

by TChris

The government spent more than a billion dollars last year in its international effort to stop drugs from entering the country, money that could have been used to help rebuild New Orleans or to fund medical research. Was it money well spent?

[P]erhaps the most important measure of the programs' efficacy was issued just a few weeks ago, when the White House drug-policy office reported that "cocaine is widely available throughout most of the nation." The office offered similar assessments for heroin and marijuana.