source:HuffingtonPost
Columnist:TomMullins
On Monday, a jury acquitted Officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli
of charges related to the death of Kelly Thomas. Immediately afterwards,
the FBI field office in Los Angeles announced that it would review the
case to determine if federal charges would be brought against the
officers.
The verdict was unpopular with civil libertarians, who cited the case
as evidence of increasing police brutality, the result of a
militarization trend in state and local police departments. They had
hoped a guilty verdict would establish some accountability for officers
who abuse their power.
They were correct to call attention to the case, but they should
oppose federal charges against Ramos and Cicinelli. Affirming the
authority of multiple governments to charge defendants with crimes for
the same behavior loses the forest for the trees. While a conviction in
federal court may feel good in this case, it further empowers the
federal government to encroach upon state jurisdiction and weakens due
process rights for defendants in general.
Bad laws and precedents are rarely set in relation to sympathetic
defendants. Federal conspiracy and RICO statutes were originally passed
in order to prosecute mob leaders for ordering murders or intimidating
witnesses. Few opposed setting aside hearsay prohibitions and other
rules of evidence for those defendants.
However, once passed, those same laws were used against hundreds of
thousands of low-level drug offenders, resulting in disproportionately
long sentences for relatively minor offenses.
It is now routine for
prosecutors to charge every drug offender with conspiracy for the
express purpose of circumventing the rules of evidence that would
otherwise apply. Judges are then required to sentence defendants not
only for the drugs they were caught with but for any drugs even
mentioned by witnesses in hearsay testimony.
That's how a defendant caught with a small amount of cocaine for
personal use ends up serving 10 or 15 years for "drug trafficking." This
is not an extreme example of what could happen. It's business as usual
in federal drug cases. It's also one of the chief reasons the United
States leads the world in prison population, at over 2.3 million
incarcerated. A disproportionate number incarcerated are minorities. READ FULL HUFFINGTONPOST
No comments :
Post a Comment