Via Drug War Rant:

Yesterday's Larry King show, included this exchange with Bill Maher and a caller:

KING: Oakville, Ontario, hello.
CHAMNEY: Hi, Mr. Maher, I'm absolutely thrilled to be speaking with you.
MAHER: Well, I'm thrilled to be talking to you, too.
CHAMNEY: My question for you is, do you plan on staying behind the marijuana mission? I don't know if you've realized...
MAHER: I do.
CHAMNEY: But you've saved peoples' lives up here in Canada and the United States. It was because of you discussing it on TV and a Web site called The Marijuana Mission that made my family understand what marijuana does for people. And it actually stopped my grandma's seizures. So, I'm no longer considered an epileptic just because I smoke it every day. And I appreciate you so much. And we talk about you up here all the time. You should run for Congress, sir.
MAHER: Thank you.
CHAMNEY: You remind me so much of my lawyer Alan Young, and he is the greatest one up here speaking about marijuana and you keep on talking down there, buddy.
MAHER: You keep puffing as the president said, let's roll. It's a good opportunity for me to bring up Tommy Chong. Tommy of "Cheech and Chong," you know he's in jail right now. He was...

By T. Chris

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and and Democrat Senator Charles Schumer are co-sponsoring a bill to increase funding for witness protection programs. In a display of bipartisanship, the Senators seemed to agree that murdering witnesses is a bad thing.

A real life example of the absurd application of our drug laws. This time in Kansas, where mushrooms bring more time than murder:

Stephen Fletcher II tried to grow some psychedelic mushrooms in his Lawrence apartment. Tremain V. Scott shot and killed a man at close range during an armed confrontation, then, according to an eyewitness, took the victim's gun and shot him with it as he lay on the ground. An autopsy showed the victim had been shot 18 times.

Both Fletcher and Scott are in their early 20s and have little or no criminal-conviction record, their attorneys say. So who's facing the stiffer sentence? Fletcher, by double.

Under state drug-sentencing guidelines, he's facing at least 11 1/2 years in prison unless a judge finds "substantial and compelling" reasons to lighten the sentence. Under a separate set of guidelines for all nondrug crimes, Scott faces between four and six years in prison for his violent crime.

Breaking it down mathematically for you:

Attempted manufacture of mushrooms: Between 11.5 years and 12.8 years if defendant has no criminal record.

Voluntary Manslaughter: 4.6 to 5.1 years if defendant has no criminal record. Second-degree murder would have been between 9 and 10.25 years.

[link via Drug War Rant .

Regulation is on its way to Oakland through zoning laws:

Only in "Oaksterdam." Here, cafes sell marijuana for medicinal use with the studied casualness of a Starbucks offering double-shot, soy milk, no-foam lattes. The model, as the nickname indicates, is free-wheeling Amsterdam, where cafe patrons openly enjoy joints with their espressos or beers. But there is one big difference: Oakland doesn't have Amsterdam's clear-cut laws, which make such sales unquestionably legal.

...The City Council president has raised concerns over the clubs' proliferation and the lack of city enforcement powers over them. The council is considering new zoning or requiring permits for the cafes, which currently need only a general business license to open.

New crime statistics undercut support for the rash of Meagan's Laws enacted by states in recent years. The laws force sex offenders to register with the state and then provides their names and addresses to the public.

A recent Justice Department report suggests that state sex-offender laws may need revisiting. The study finds former sex offenders are much less likely to be rearrested than other former criminals after their release from prison.

The Justice report raises the question of whether these laws were overreactions to a few high-profile events, rather than reasoned legislation. At the least, the laws isolate and stigmatize those who have served time for a sex crime - a sort of excess punishment that may unfairly assume all sex offenders will tend toward the same behavior for life.

Via Drug War Rant: If you've got a tv in the kitchen, check out C-span today at 1:00 pm Eastern, for a "drug policy debate between William Bennett (moralizing drug warrior...) and Kurt Schmoke (former Mayor of Baltimore and drug policy reform advocate)."

Related: In Los Angeles this week, U.S. District Court Judge Howard Matz sentenced three men who distributed marijuana to the sick to probation and community service, departing downward from guidelines of 30 plus months. Matz praised the men's work and called the prosecution "badly misguided."

Update: Read Drug War Rant's Thanksgiving Day story--as Walter in Denver says, be thankful if nothing like this has happened to your family.

A new report by the National Research Council finds that the methodology used by the FBI to match bullets is flawed. For background on the issue, see our report here.

A panel of government scientific advisers has found that an FBI forensic technique long used to link bullets with assailants is scientifically flawed and potentially misleading to juries, a finding that could affect hundreds of convictions.

The method, which measures the likelihood of a chemical match between bullets found at crime scenes and those in the possession of a defendant, has been used for more than three decades. The Los Angeles Times obtained a draft summary of the report, which is expected to be released by the National Research Council (NRC) in December.

....FBI examiners have often stated or implied in court that a bullet can be traced to a specific manufacturing batch — even to a particular box.....The NRC panel substantially agreed with recent research indicating that bullets from the same source of lead can significantly vary in their chemical makeup, and bullets from different sources — even those manufactured years apart — can share nearly identical amounts of trace elements.

The finding contradicted some prosecutors' depictions of each batch of lead as being unique, like a snowflake or fingerprint. The study suggests the number of "matching" bullets was impossible to determine and could be in the tens of millions or higher — reducing the significance of a match.

Police departments are now using palm prints as means of identifying offenders.

All of a person's "friction ridged skin" is distinctively patterned: soles, palms and even the writer's palm, as the outer side of the hand is called. Surveys of law enforcement agencies indicate that at least 30 percent of the prints lifted from crime scenes — from knife hilts, gun grips, steering wheels and window panes — are of palms, not fingers.

30 police agencies around the country now have palm databases.

Beginning next month, the [New York City] department will be able to do computerized matches of the 100,000 palm prints it has already collected. As the database grows, it will become one of the largest of its kind.

Defense lawyers are dubious about the new "science."

Using palm prints for identification concerns some defense lawyers, who point out that the reliability of fingerprint matching has come into question in the courts in recent years, and that there is even less data available on palm prints.

...Some defense lawyers raise the same objections to palm print identifications as they have to fingerprints. "The criminal courtroom is no place to experiment with a scientific method that may incriminate someone," said Steven D. Benjamin, the co-chairman of the forensic evidence committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The FBI says the technique is as reliable as that for fingerprints, and in a few years, they probably will be adding footprints.

Regarding the man who choked on marijuana and died when stopped by police while changing a flat tire...and the woman who died at the Seattle Airport during a similar police encounter, Seattle criminal defense attorney and NORML board member Jeff Steinborn writes the following, in a letter that might be called, Liberty is Always an Unfinished Biz:

What's the excitement all of a sudden about overly "aggressive" cops? Cops beat up an informant? Cops rough up a citizen over a marijuana pipe at the airport and she dies? Cops bully a witness until they get the testimony they want? This is nothing new. I meet several clients every month who, along with their families, have been bullied and physically terrorized while being arrested for marijuana. Often the witnesses against them recant, saying that police forced them to sign false statements accusing the suspect.

In 1963 the Seattle ACLU was working on a project to get civilian review for the police. 40 years later we still don't have it and demonstrably out of control police officers still suffer no consequences unless the unthinkable happens: a fellow officer tells the truth about their misconduct. .

The simple fact is that for a small but readily identifiable minority of police officers, as one prosecuting attorney told me when I complained about a frail pot smoker being roughed up, "that's the way they investigate." Judges, too, turn a deaf ear. Although our constitution requires that the fruits of unlawful police conduct be "suppressed" at trial, the fact that police acted like sadistic gangsters while searching your home will not result in the suppression of the evidence, no matter how extreme the police conduct.

It's a good thing that for this brief moment the daylight is shining on this shadowy corner of law enforcement. Among our otherwise fine law enforcement agencies in this state there is a small but traditionally well-protected group who can only be described as malicious children without adult supervision. This would be a good time for responsible law enforcement officers to join in to help eliminate these abuses. Let's hope this doesn't get buried as it has been for the last 40 years.

Yours very truly,

Jeffrey Steinborn
Board Member,
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
PotBust.com

A new report by the House Committee on Government Reform finds that the F.B.I. Used Killers as Informants:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's policy "must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement" and had "disastrous consequences," the report said.

More than 20 people were killed by F.B.I. informants in Boston starting in 1965, often with the help of F.B.I. agents, it said, but no F.B.I. agent or official has ever been disciplined.

Another prohibition related death....Man chokes to death trying to hide bag of pot from the cops:

FORT WORTH, Texas - A man changing a flat tire choked to death on a bag of marijuana he had stuffed down his throat in an apparent attempt to hide it
from police who stopped to help him, authorities said. Nickolas Sandoval, 24, died Wednesday.

Officers were unaware at first Sandoval had drugs when they spotted him on
the highway in Corinth, about 45 miles northeast of Fort Worth, said Corinth
police Cpl. Frank Lott. "Officers went from 'Oh, hey, here is someone with a flat tire' to 'Hey, this guy is choking,'" Lott told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Sandoval, of Ponder, was pronounced dead at a hospital. Cause of death:
"asphyxiation due to aspiration of plastic bag," according to a spokeswoman
for the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office. Sandoval was convicted at least three times of marijuana possession, and pleaded guilty two years ago to a drunken-driving charge.

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The breathalyser may become obsolete in testing for drunk and drugged drivers. A new device, The Impairment Detector, measures motor behavior instead of testing for particular substances and the British are finding it very successful. It may also become the test of choice to determine if someone is driving under the influence of drugs. From The New Scientist:

Whether you are drunk, drugged, tired or ill, a new device promises to measure whether you are fit to drive. If successful in trials, it could replace the breathalyser, which only measures alcohol levels. The new hand-held device takes a different tack, by assessing motor control, ability to react to the unexpected and concentration

A hand-held device designed to identify drivers impaired by drugs, alcohol or excessive tiredness, is being evaluated by the British police. The device is intended to deliver a quick yes or no verdict on whether a person is in a fit state to drive and works by assessing the driver's behaviour, rather than testing for particular substances. It is the first of its kind to be tested by police anywhere in the world.