Here's a piece I wrote a few years ago. Makes me wonder if some things never change. Anyway, recent police actions against Occupiers has me feeling that, while this is just slightly dated, it's also completely topical.
The case of Weldon Angelos is widely known in Utah, and in wider legal circles. His pot dealing career netted him a conviction and sentence for in excess of fifty years. Even the “throw the book at them” judge who sentenced this defendant felt unease at the length of time involved in the particular case. Aside from the fact that Mr. Angelos commonly kept company with firearms during his daily life, he was really a run of the mill drug dealer. But for the guns, he would have gotten a sentence that he might actually outlive.
Mind you, there was no violence, shooting, brandishing of weapons/strong arm tactics, etc. The guy just felt safer, I suppose. But the appeals courts agreed that Congress had the right to conclude that this particular sentence makes the rest of safer, instead.
Now Congress is being asked to revisit the “use of a firearm in the commission of a crime” act in a way that requires suprehuman mental gymnastics. It also illustrates why the so-called “culture war” being waged by whacko right wingers realistically cannot be brought to an end by anything less than full on drug legalization. It’s starting to look like this is a war that we have no choice but to fight, and to win.
Whether we want to or not, we are forced to revisit the case of the two Border Patrol agents recently sentenced to serve long terms in federal prison for a shooting they were involved in down South Texas way. Juries just never convict cops of anything, but this one did. They shot a drug suspect in a manner that was egregious enough that lightning struck their Courtroom. After that, the results were really foreordained, because it’s hard to shoot someone without using a gun, and doing crimes with guns involved revs up sentences in the federal system. Long story short, these two guys join Mr. Angelos on the list of people who have all of the reason in the world to regret that they ever set eyes on a firearm.
Except that there is now a tidal wave from the political right demanding an amendment so that dirty cops can get away with things that anyone else would be buried under the prison for. You see, “it’s not fair” to make cops obey laws normally, at least not when they are lucky enough to pick their victims well. We’ll have to wait to see just who the cops are allowed to illegally shoot without it rising to the level of being a big deal but the entire concept has to make any thinking person queasy. We will clearly have open season on drug suspects but you know that that will be the beginning and not the end.
It’s also enough to raise the question of whether this whole brand of insanity has gone on long enough. “The War on Drugs” is something that we wage against our own families, friends, and neighbors (and even against ourselves, really, all hypocrisy aside). Now, as if that is not bad enough, efforts are being made to escalate tactics in a way that can really only be halted by halting the war itself. Legalize drugs and crime in this country diminishes drastically. With the decrease in crime our whole society can stop being uptight about behavior that will be far less harmful to accept than to continue to try to eradicate.
As a society, we deserve to have police who believe in the philosophy of “protect and serve”. How are they going to do that when they are simultaneously being told that it is okay to wage war against us? By what twisted logic can it be said that we are being served by cops who feel entitled to shoot us if they want to?
If we are going to legalize anything, it sure as hell makes a lot more sense to legalize drugs than to legalize rogue cops.