America's most enduring policy failure

The writers of The Wire tackle the issue of American drug policy in the pages of Time magazine:

...[T]his [drug] war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

The Wire's War on The Drug War (Time, 5 Mar 2008)

They don't wind up advocating decriminalization outright... but, as a first step, they do advocate for jury nullification.

Their article was so good and so short that I was tempted to reproduce it in its entirety. I damn nearly did anyway. Go: read the whole thing.

And once you've read that, go read this:

One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Pew Center Public Safety Performance Project)

...and reflect on that fact that, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we lock up more people (both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our population) than any other country on the planet:

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000. (source)

In case you were wondering, the "1 in 100" figure includes people who are locked up in local jails awaiting trial, explaining the 1% incarceration rate vs. the 0.75% rate of imprisonment (people who have been tried and sentenced.)

Amino acid test

In April 1993, a man in a balaclava mask escaped after sexually assaulting a 36-year-old woman in the town of Bridgwater, England. More than 13 years later, forensic detectives used an unusual approach to track the man down: A genetic trace that led first to his sister.

Known as familial searching, the U.K. technique has already helped crack 20 difficult cases and led to the arrest of several long-elusive murderers and rapists.

The innovation is propelled by the growth of Britain's DNA database, which holds the records of 4.2 million people in England and Wales, or nearly 8% of the population there, one of the largest proportions in the world. Anyone arrested -- including for minor offenses -- must provide a DNA sample, which stays in the database permanently, even if the person is acquitted. About a quarter of the profiles are of minors, some as young as 10.

The U.S. is now considering following Britain's lead...

The Gene Police (Wall Street Journal, 23 February 2008)

Elder-care nightmare

Seven years ago, Barbara Clark pleaded guilty to stealing more than $5,000 from a 90-year-old man at the Durham retirement community where she worked.

A judge gave her a suspended sentence and ordered Clark not to work anywhere she would have access to elderly people's property or possessions for three years.

On Thursday, Clark was charged with first-degree murder, accused of fatally beating a 92-year-old woman who had hired her as a housekeeper. The woman had asked Clark to come to her Fearrington Village retirement center apartment to discuss stolen checks.

Doretta Walker, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Clark after her 2000 arrest, saw her on the news Wednesday night.

"I prosecuted that lady and told her not to work with the elderly, there she goes killing an old lady," Walker said. "When I saw her on TV last night, I said, 'I know that lady.'

"You should have seen my face."

Clark is accused of beating Margaret Murta to death, and seriously injuring her long-time friend Mary Corcoran, 82, and their neighbor Rebecca Fisher, 77.

Suspect was ordered to avoid elderly (News and Observer, 7 December 2007)

From now on, when people ask me why I don't trust the State of North Carolina or home-health care agencies to perform adequate due diligence on their certified nursing assistants, and why I personally run criminal background checks on any home-care aides who help take care of my Mom, I'll just point them to this article.

Oh, and a big "attaboy" to the criminal justice system for giving Barbara Clark a get out of jail free card suspended sentence on felony larceny and felony exploitation of an elderly or disabled person seven years ago.

Stealing from the weak and vulnerable is *exactly* the kind of thing where leniency is called for, don't you think?

CSI: Mississippi

If your blood pressure is a little -- or a lot -- low, Radley Balko can take care of that for you:

In a remarkable capital murder case earlier this year, the Mississippi Supreme Court, by an 8-to-1 vote, tossed out the expert testimony of Steven Hayne. The defendant was Tyler Edmonds, a 13-year-old boy accused of killing his sister’s husband. Hayne, Mississippi’s quasi-official state medical examiner, had testified that the victim’s bullet wounds supported the prosecution’s theory that Edmonds and his sister had shot the man together, each putting a hand on the weapon and pulling the trigger at the same time.

“I would favor that a second party be involved in that positioning of the weapon,” Hayne told the jury. “It would be consistent with two people involved. I can’t exclude one, but I think that would be less likely.”

Testifying that you can tell from an autopsy how many hands were on the gun that fired a bullet is like saying you can tell the color of a killer’s eyes from a series of stab wounds. It’s absurd. The Mississippi Supreme Court said Hayne’s testimony was “scientifically unfounded” and should not have been admitted. Based on this and other errors, it ordered a new trial for Edmonds.

But it wasn’t the doctor’s dubious claim that made the case unusual. It’s the fact that the court explicitly renounced his testimony. It was the first time that had happened to Hayne in hundreds of cases dating back nearly 20 years.

By any sane standard, the decision was long overdue. Hayne’s career in court is an egregious example of what happens when the criminal justice system fails to adequately oversee expert testimony. He may be unusually careless, but he is not unique—not in Mississippi, and not in the United States.

CSI: Mississippi (Radley Balko, Reason magazine, November 2007)