Fresno County Sheriff Mims provides her own example.

The Fresno Bee reports today that Mims has decided to join the growing list of California cops who say, “Fuck what the voters want.  This is my county!”

Mims trots out the old “pot dispensaries are magnets for crime” stories.  Makes sense…to those who already feel that regardless of the fact that modern medicine has finally started to catch up with what people have known for over 5000 years, they want none of it.  Medical marijuana is, for those who rely on it, a godsend.  But the mythology that started the War on Drugs doesn’t care about that.  And Mims, who almost certainly has a money motive in keeping the War alive, will have none of that, either.

This post is not about the medicinal qualities of marijuana.  Frankly, I don’t want to write an article long enough to cover all the benefits of natural remedies over the more-profitable, more-dangerous, artificial ones drug companies insist upon.  Besides, while I do defend medical marijuana growers and therefore read quite a lot of marijuana law, I don’t use it.  So I can’t speak about the benefits from my own experience.  I only know that an increasing number of studies show that marijuana has for decades now been cloaked in so many lies that it’s hard for uneducated people to know about the thousands of years of positive history humanity has had with the plant.

The potroversy, though, does provide further insight into the way cops think.

Sheriff Mims — as she has done so many times before — reminds us that getting her way is much more important than doing her job.  Her job, of course, is to enforce the law.  Mims wants none of that.  California voters approved medical marijuana?  Over her dead body!, she tell us.  Why, they’re goddamn “magnets for crime.”

Frankly, if that were true, I’d think her and her donut-chomping lackeys would appreciate them more.  They already refuse to respond to crimes on the basis that they just don’t have time for that.  So, if pot dispensaries are such crime magnets, why not just set up a few county-run dispensaries, park a cruiser out front and then hold press conferences each week to pat yourself on the back when you arrest all the magnetized criminals irresistibly drawn to your location?

Of course, it’s not really that easy.

Because Sheriff Mims is lying.

Dispensaries are no more magnets for crime than are stores that sell alcohol.  Or groceries.  The story in which Mims was quoted notes that there have been two crimes committed involving dispensaries in the last month.  Two whole crimes!  (Well, one wasn’t 100% “whole” since the attempted robbery failed when the dispensary owner ducked into a closet.)

How many convenience stores have been robbed in that same time period?  How many grocery stores?  As I recall, someone tried to rob a SaveMart about a week or so ago.  That’s a large chain store!  Banks?  Now there are some magnets for crime!  ATM thefts, bank robberies, you name it.  Is Sheriff Mims lobbying to shut any of them down?

Nope.

But that’s not the only reason I know Sheriff Mims is lying.  And it’s also not just because her lips are moving.  I know Sheriff Mims is lying because she admitted as much herself:

Mims said her office has not examined how much crime has been reported at and around dispensaries. But she said she also is troubled by law-enforcement reports that marijuana grown illegally on public land has been bought by dispensaries.

Sheriff Mims doesn’t know how much crime has been reported at or around dispensaries. But don’t pay attention to that.  She’s troubled by “law-enforcement reports.”

So am I.  I’m troubled by law-enforcement reports — including those to the ever-gullible Fresno Police Cheerleaders Gazette Bee, which wouldn’t know an investigative reporter, or a critical thinker, if one walked in and bit the editor on the ass.  I’m troubled by law enforcement reports which contain more lies than truth.  Even the ones that don’t exist, like those Sheriff Mims made up for the Bee.

Did a law enforcement officer find a dispensary that bought pot that was grown illegally?

Then why didn’t they arrest the people — at least the owners — at the dispensary?  Why didn’t they trot them out in front of reporters, instead of made-up stories about invisible magnets?

California has two primary sets of laws controlling the growth, transportation, distribution and use of medical marijuana.  The Compassionate Use Act and California Senate Bill 420, known as the Medical Marijuana Program Act. Neither allows medical marijuana dispensaries to possess or distribute marijuana grown illegally.  Medical marijuana law in California allows certain individuals and collectives to grow marijuana legally.  Dispensaries can — and do — obtain their marijuana from such sources.

But that won’t satisfy the likes of Sheriff Mims.  She doesn’t like pot.  She won’t support the laws of the State of California.  She doesn’t give a damn whether they’re passed by the voters, or the California legislature. And she doesn’t care if she has to lie to convince you how terrible marijuana dispensaries are, because she just “knows.”

That’s how cops think.

How terrible the Terrible Twos were for not-so-good King George III. How wonderful the blossoming into young adolescence was the final form of our constitutionally-founded nation.  But we are old now.  The nation suffers from a kind of collective Alzheimer’s as we celebrate our two-hundred-and-thirty-fourth “birthday.”

Our Founders, those who gave birth to what has been unarguably the greatest nation on Earth — though one may doubt whether we still deserve that title — were a rebellious lot.  They would not have tolerated a police force that makes things up as it goes and almost always what is made up is contrary to law.  They would not have stood for a police force which, under the guise of making us safe, takes over our neighborhoods, placing everyone under house arrest and threatening the very safety they claim to be protecting.

This, by the way, is exactly what happened in the Tower District in Fresno less than a week ago.  As one eyewitness wrote to me:

I live in an attic apartment on [a street in the area]. The home has a separate, gated entrance that leads to a small yard and a set of stairs that lead upstairs to my apartment.

Ghetto bird flew overhead for over 15 minutes before I truly paid attention. When they started flashing in my windows, I looked outside and realized the street was blocked by 8 police cars. My downstairs neighbors were having a get together, and were still outside. They were ordered to get inside their house. Two out of three armed suspects had been apprehended earlier. The third was hiding in bushes that divide my yard and the next door apartment complex. Now, [a friend of the person who wrote this], who lives downstairs is as protective of me as his sister, who lives directly behind me. He called me and told me what was going on, recommended that I enter his house thru the back door.

Big mistake…I opened my door to walk downstairs, only to be screamed at that there was an armed and dangerous suspect outside. The helicopter immediately shined on me. I was not given any opportunity to speak. I closed the door and notified [my friend] that I was not allowed to walk outside. He had been involved in a “discussion” with an officer earlier, when he went outside on his porch to smoke a cigarette.

Thirty minutes later, it was still going on, except they are now on the megaphone, informing the “suspect” that he needed to surrender. Officers “see” him and he wasn’t getting away. At that point, my windows were open to overhear the situation.As I was being “highlighted” I walked to my window, to peek outside where in sync, three officers pointed their guns at me and another waved for me to get away from the window.

Now, I can not recall exactly, but before I got to the window, only one officer had his gun out. The others followed when I “scared” them by looking outside my second story window.

This is the world in which we now live.  Yet the lack of any appreciation for our Constitution is not the only difference between us and our ancestors.  They would have rebelled.  Those officers in the street would have found themselves under fire if they tried to corral the Founders of these United States “for their own safety.”

Our Founders would have realized the truth: there was more danger from the police locking down a neighborhood than there was from the fact that an armed gunman had run through it.

I am not afraid to live in the Tower, I am afraid of the “knee jerk” reactions from our FPD.

I had my cell in hand to film the event, or at least photograph, but earlier in the week, Kendall Simsarian had tweeted against questioning officers, or recording them. So, with the guns in my direction, I took the safer route!

I do not even know if the third suspect was even caught.

For most of the life of the United States, we lived by a set of values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and a set of rules enshrined in the Constitution which created these United States.  Today, the values are but buzzwords; the rules have become, at best, guidelines — a means for criminal defense attorneys like me to try, usually unsuccessfully, to rein in the governmental abuses of a police force run amok.

I say this with sadness more than my own sense of rebellion.  Nobody — not even we much-maligned criminal defense attorneys — wants people who hurt other people to wander our streets unchecked.  As law student and aspiring prosecutor Laura McWilliams put it,

No one wants an innocent to be hurt; nor does anyone want a guilty individual to commit a future crime. We all live in this society….

Yet as we approach 234 years of age — 234 years during which the forces of “power” have hammered away at the rebellious spirit of the Constitution meant to limit power — criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett responds to Laura:

[T]he system is out of balance. Convicting the accused is too easy (else innocent people would not go to prison) and sentences (especially under guidelines regimes) are too harsh. If there is the possibility of the government killing someone for a crime he didn’t commit, the train has gone off the rails.

The problem, as Mark sees it — and I agree wholeheartedly — is this:

One reason that the system is so badly out of whack is that the criminal justice system is viewed, even by law students, as a tool to protect not only our safety, but also “our collective morals.” The protection of our collective morals—the mythical province of aspiring theocrats—leads to the condemnation and prosecution of conduct that threatens our safety only tenuously, if at all.

Our legal system is not about “collective morals.”  It’s about power.  If you don’t believe me, take Jeff Gamso’s implied advice.  In writing about the unexcitement, the safeness, of the nomination of Elena Kagan — “about as non-revolutionary a choice as there could be for the [United States Supreme] Court — he noted:

I want a lawyer who’s actually practiced law.  I want someone who’s stood in the well next to some poor person charged with a crime or victimized by the police or an unfeeling government agency or a major corporation.  I want a person on the court who knows what it means to stand up for the Bill of Rights at some risk.  Someone who actually knows something about risk.

But as Paul Kennedy, blogging at The Defense Rests, says,

While we’re at the beach or cooking out, watching a baseball game or fireworks, most of us have completely lost sight of the significance of what took place in Philadelphia back in 1776 when delegates from the colonies risked their lives by signing their names to the most revolutionary of documents.

This was driven home when a man asked me where he could get a copy of what we were reading. He seemed shocked when I told him it was the Declaration of Independence.

Risk?  What risk?  We have become a risk-averse nation.  And to avoid risk, we have to limit the actions of individuals who might not agree to go along with the status quo. Individual liberties must be curtailed, lest individuals do something that puts the nebulous rest of us — “society” — at risk.  Thus Gideon points out:

The concept is dying a quick and painful death. It took only 200 odd years for the pendulum to have shifted completely in the opposite direction. By attrition, or force of sensationalism, or crowdsourced fear, the line drawn by the Constitution has turned around and is now facing those very individuals it sought to protect. The idea of individual liberties is so foreign to most, that comes as a surprise to many that the founders fought and fought hard for them.

The concept Gideon is talking about pertains to

the rights of individuals – all individuals and checks against the power of the large governmental entities. The Constitution drew a line and on the site that was protected were placed the flesh and blood individuals, the citizenry and on the side that was being warned and whose authority was being severely limited was the abstract, nameless, faceless Government.What a beautiful concept: we are individuals first and as individuals, we have rights that will not be subordinate to those of an ever-changing abstract concept.

A beautiful and dangerous concept.  A concept that disallows a police force the power to shut down entire neighborhoods and threaten the inhabitants in order to prevent the most heinous of consequences: a suspect who, however temporarily, gets away.

Thomas Jefferson, a principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, once declared the benefits of a citizenry ever-ready to rebel against its government.  “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” Jefferson wrote.

Today, as we celebrate 234 years as a country launched by the Declaration of Independence from tyranny, my own spirit continues to resonate with that exemplified by our Founders.  Like Norm Pattis,

I am an American by birth, and a lawyer by choice. Hence, I have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. But the promise of these laws sometimes rings hollow in my ears. When I read the Declaration of Independence, I am inspired by a hope that seems unredeemed. The heady days of a colony breaking from a distant overlord are long-since past. We now have our own lords, and they are no longer distant. Where do we now turn for a renewal of the spirit of liberty?

I vote that we all turn to the Declaration of Independence. And there’s no better day than today, the commemoration of the day it was signed by those who helped fight and die for its ideals, to read it and learn about its history.

Today is such a day.

The Fresno Bee this morning starts us off with the unsensational headline,

Tattoo ‘hurts…it hurts a lot,’ boy says (Pablo Lopez, “Tattoo ‘hurts…it hurts a lot,’ boy says” (May 26, 2010) The Fresno Bee, A1.)

The story is of a boy who allegedly was forcibly held down and tattooed with a gang tattoo by his father, who is said to be a Bulldog gang member.  Most people to whom I’ve spoken agree — and the story indicates the defense attorneys are also arguing this — that the charge, which is aggravated mayhem, was intended to be used for defendants accused of permanently disfiguring someone, such as by cutting off an arm, ear, or by setting them on fire.

If convicted, the father and his “accomplice” in this crime are looking at life in prison.

That’s right.  Life.  For tattooing his son.

Under California law, tattooing a minor is a crime punishable as a misdemeanor, with a maximum of six months in jail, or a fine, or both.  (CA Pen. Code §653; CA Pen. Code §19.)

But that’s not good enough.  These guys are gang members.  GANG MEMBERS, I TELL YOU!

Sorry.  I was getting into the spirit of things.  When gang members are involved, after all, no punishment is serious enough.  Especially if, on top of being gang members, they happen to commit a crime.  Even a misdemeanor.

If it weren’t for the huge amount of human suffering involved, I’d be delighted to see the District Attorney’s office — and some segments of the public — screaming for yet another relatively trivial crime resulting in life in prison.  I’ve already written elsewhere about the impact this has on our budgets.

The Fresno Bee provides some insight into that problem, too, on page 3:

Pot clinic owner in jail tug-of-war (Paula Lloyd, “Pot clinic owner in jail tug-of-war” (May 26, 2010) A3.

Robert Morse, the owner of a Tower District medical-marijuana clinic, has been sent back to jail yet again by Judge Franson, who appears to be primarily angered over the lack of respect shown his court by Morse.  Morse has repeatedly ignored the judge’s orders.  Now it’s the Sheriff’s turn.

Sheriff Mims, claiming to be acting under a federal mandate, keeps releasing Morse due to jail overcrowding.  The judge keeps sending him back and telling the Sheriff to keep him there until a 15-day sentence handed down by the judge has been served.

Morse can’t be kept because we’re busy locking up “violent” gang members for misdemeanors.  Our prison system is also in a near-meltdown state because of the increasing numbers of people being sent there for what are really societally-disapproved behaviors which, frankly, should not be crimes.

There’s no word yet on whether Judge Franson will add Sheriff Mims to the list of prisoners he wants held for dissing him.

Tattoos are great for at least semi-permanently marking individuals for easy classification.  California hasn’t quite reached the point yet of demanding tattoos for criminals — frankly, they don’t have to, since criminals have been more than happy to tattoo themselves — but for that class of criminals attempting to keep a low profile, the State will have none of it.

The same Fresno Bee that brought me the above stories tells me about a California Assembly bill which will require certain sex offenders to wear Hawthorne’s Scarlet “A” — well, okay, maybe it’s not an “A”; it’s some “distinctive stripe or color,” possibly not even scarlet — on their driver’s licenses.  The stated goal is to make it easier for law enforcement to be “on alert when they stop and question people.”

It will also allow, of course, for anyone else — bartenders, waitresses, sales people checking ID against a credit card, etc. — to know that a sex offender is in their midst.  This will make them safer — the viewer, that is; not the sex offender, who can probably be expected to be subjected to further harassment.  But, hey, it’s a sex offender, right?  It’s not like we’re talking about a person we’d like to entice into acting like the human we don’t think he is!

The bill is backed by that most un-impassioned of California critters, the ones who increasingly structure how our criminal “justice” system works: the father of a 14-year-old girl who was raped and murdered.  Oh, and, that more despicable class of compassionate California critter, who only wants what’s best for California: our politicians.  It’s bipartisan, though (who doesn’t hate sex offenders?): sponsor Pedro Nava is a Democrat, while sponsor Paul Cook is Republican.

The bill is a missed opportunity, though, for solving all the problems discussed in this blog post in one feel swoop.  I’m almost afraid to say this:  So far, nobody has looked at the possibility of balancing the budget by releasing gang members from jails and prisons and providing them with small business loans to allow them to open tattoo parlors under the condition that they provide free forehead tattoos to California’s burgeoning sex offender population.

The sad thing is, the way things are going, some brain-dead “damn the rule of law, gotta support those victims!” politician is bound to latch onto something similar soon.

A War, in fact, which we cannot win.  Because to win, you see, we’d have to be something other than what we are…

…humans.

The Fresno Bee, publishing an Associated Press story, began my day with this:

After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what?  Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.  (Martha Mendoza, “A Failed Plan? Fight against drugs costs more than ever with no end in sight” (March 18, 2010) B1, col. 2.)

I guess it’s been long enough since Prohibition that everyone forgot we lost that War, too.  Call it “Drug War I.”  We’ve been stuck for quite some time in “Drug War II.”

Like the World Wars after which I modeled those names, the United States, while a key player, is just one piece in the war.  Unlike those Wars, there are no heroes: we’re not riding to anyone’s rescue.  (The War does let us occasionally do something, though, that the United States has been good at since before it was born: there’s been a lot of “collateral damage” to indigenous peoples.)  Like its older siblings, the World Wars, this one has seen our troops distributed around the globe.

Not everyone agrees that this War has been as much a waste of resources and has brought on as much human misery as the original Prohibition.

“To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven’t made any difference is ridiculous,” [former U.S. drug czar] Walters said.  “It destroys everything we’ve done.  It’s saying all the people involved in law enforcement, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time.  It’s saying all these people’s work is misguided.”  (Mendoza, supra.)

In other words, as with the original Prohibition, that would require us to admit a colossal mistake.

If only we could destroy everything they’ve done!  But, alas, the legacy of this failed War will likely outlast the United States.  It has already outlasted the Constitution.

In fact, a fairly strong argument can be made that Drug War II necessitated — and thus it is no surprise that it brought about — the death of that Constitution.

First, it necessitated the death because, as the previously-linked page delineates, the War on Drugs is almost certainly unconstitutional.  In earlier times, virtually all Americans would have recognized this.  That’s why our original Prohibition required a constitutional amendment.  So far as I know, that amendment is the first-ever constitutional stripping away of rights.  Finally realizing the stupidity of that act, the 21st amendment repealed the 18th — repealed Prohibition — and restored the rights which had been stripped away by that one-of-a-kind amendment.

That, to my knowledge, is the only time rights have been constitutionally stripped away from us.  It would not, however, be the last time we were stripped of our rights.  After the gyrations the government had to go through first to implement Prohibition and then to repeal it — as any supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment can tell you, getting constitutional amendments passed is hell! — they just decided it would be easier to ignore the Constitution whenever it got in the way, rather than to amend it.  A primary argument of this post is that the War on Drugs has actually been a War on Rights, stripping away nearly everything, as the United States Constitution has been quite literally flipped on its head.  It’s as if the Constitution, invented long before photography, were a negative.

Oh, crap.  I forget that most of my readers probably grew up with digital cameras.

Short aside: In the old days, a “negative” was a piece of glass, or (in more recent times) a piece of chemical-coated plastic.  We called the plastic versions, at least, “film.”  You’ve heard the term.  You probably just didn’t know what it meant.  Anyway, when the shutter opened on a camera, it exposed the “film” to light.  The bright parts of the original subject — the thing you were taking a picture of — became represented on a negative as dark parts; the dark parts ended up on the negative as light parts.  It was the exact opposite of the scene you were photographing.

Like our Constitution.  And your rights.  And the power of the government.

The Constitution was meant to place limitations on what governments could do.  The rights — actually we called them “powers” — of government were limited.  The rights — we actually called them rights! — of human beings were not.  Except to the extent that it was necessary to give some up in order to give those rights — now called “powers” — to government.

The idea was to give up just enough of our rights to allow a government to do the most basic of tasks: keep us safe from people — like Kings, or maybe dictators, foreign countries, or maybe despots within our own country — who would try to reduce the rest of our rights.  The ones we kept.

Well, around about the time we started to develop glass plates — those were the predecessors to film, but I didn’t want to really do a full-on photography history lesson here — government, primarily driven by then-President Abraham Lincoln, got the idea that the Constitution, paper though it was, was a kind of negative as well.  Where we previously thought the Constitution limited the rights (remember, we called them “powers”) of the government, our government began to promulgate the theory that the limitation was actually on our rights (remember, we called them “rights”; actually, sometimes we referred to them as “freedoms”).

So it came to be that today people mistakenly believe that the Constitution limits the rights of individuals.  And if a right claimed by a person is not “in the Constitution,” then it doesn’t exist.

Oh how I wish someone would have told Hamilton “show me where the Constitution grants people a right to privacy!”

This confusion about what the Constitution does and does not do happened for two reasons.

The first is that people don’t read anymore.  After all, you can’t actually read the Constitution — in English, Spanish, or even Swahili (I don’t know if it’s actually printed in Swahili) — and not realize that it is the government which is being limited.  You can’t read the Constitution and actually not see that there is a Ninth and a Tenth Amendment in The First Ten Amendments, a.k.a., the Bill of Rights.  (Hamilton was 100% spot-on about the dangers of that damn thing.)

The second reason is that over the years since America’s first dictator — Abraham Lincoln — saved us from ourselves, our government has increasingly desensitized us to the idea that it was, in fact, limited; that we were, in fact, not intended to be, except to the smallest extent necessary, as mentioned above.

Besides, most of the other nations left us alone after the first few decades following the Revolution.  With no one else to fight, we’ve had to start or invent various wars — the Mexican-American War (oh, darn, I wasn’t going to mention that after yesterday’s debacle), Civil War, Drug War I (Prohibition) and, most recently, Drug War II — just so our government would have something to do.

Besides, our leaders can’t survive without war.  Or, at least, they can’t survive in the style to which they’ve become accustomed.

But the fact of the matter is that, for the rest of us, for the average American, the War on Drugs has been an abject failure.

[President] Nixon’s first drug-fighting budget was $100 million.  It’s now risen to $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon’s amount even when adjusted for inflation.

Regardless of the additional funds, high school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.  (Mendoza, supra.)

Nixon, by the way, started Drug War II after being forced to end the Vietnam War.  As I said, our leaders need wars.

The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — “an overburdened justice system, a strained health-care system, lost productivity and environmental destruction” — cost the United States $215 billion a year.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.  (Mendoza, supra, emphasis added.)

Now we know how this happens.

Much of the meaninglessness of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution — that which controls searches and seizures by the government — can be directly traced to Drug War I and Drug War II.  During Prohibition, the case law allowing searches of automobiles developed to combat bootleggers. Likewise, the initial development of case law regarding wiretaps grew out of the Prohibition. In a very real sense, then, the Wars on Drugs — what I’ve called Drug War I and Drug War II — brought an end to the Lochner Era, and to the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution as somehow limiting the government.

In spite of this, we have gained little.  Never did Benjamin Franklin’s words ring truer; we have given up nearly all our liberty, for less safety.

From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether law enforcement — no matter how well funded and well trained — could ever defeat the drug problem.  (Mendoza, supra.)

It can’t.  What it has done, however, is to bring our once-great nation to its knees. As former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel put it:

Look what happened.  It’s an ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars.  It has loaded our jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Columbia.  (Mendoza, supra.)

First, the Drug Wars broke our Constitution.  Then Drug War II broke the backs of our weaker southern neighbors.  Now the War on Drugs stands to break all our budgets.  Our governments can no longer support our anti-drug habit.

The problem with War, though, is that — at least for human beings — it’s the strongest of addictions.

“[M]odern police forces are staffed with professionals,” Scalia said.

If Fresno police chief Jerry Dyer gets his way, well, if this ever was true — and I seriously doubt it ever was — it certainly will not be going forward.

Dyer says that the city is running out of money.  No surprise there.  His solution for dealing with it, however, is interesting: volunteers to take the place of trained police officers.

You’ve got to love the way the story starts:

Attention, Columbo-wannabes. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer wants to hear from you — if you’ll work for free. (George Hostetter, “Cash-strapped Fresno police enlist volunteers” (May 1, 2010) The Fresno Bee.)

According to the story, Dyer proposes to use volunteers to “do some investigative police work,” including handling the investigation of vehicle thefts, vehicle burglary cases, possibly responding to commercial burglaries, and definitely would include gathering crime scene evidence.

Yoo-hoo!  Why watch CSI on television when you can play CSI in your own home town?

The story goes on to point out that this idea is so wonderful that

Using volunteers to handle jobs formerly handled by employees could catch on at Fresno City Hall and other local governments as officials struggle with declining revenues. (Hostetter, supra.)

Forget the fact that even police officers who have allegedly been properly trained make mistakes in collecting and maintaining the integrity of evidence all the time (not to mention evaluating it), what I want to know is how come if I want people to work for me for free, that will land me in hot water with the labor boards, but the city openly discusses firing paid employees, replacing them with unpaid volunteers and that’s not only okay, it’s lauded.

“There’s a lot to consider,” [Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin] said. “We’ve got to have a good system in place where we are recruiting and screening and training and monitoring those volunteers. But, potentially, it is a way to continue the service levels that our public is accustomed to while keeping the cost low.”  (Hostetter, supra.)

Yeah?  Well, let us cash-strapped business owners bring in a few unpaid “volunteers” and we’ll not only continue service levels our customers are accustomed to, we’ll dramatically increase them.  To heck with minimum wage laws.

Oh, and Justice Scalia’s professional police force?  If we thought it was bad before, imagine how bad things can get with a bunch of amateur Columbos and CSI-wannabes running around.

Frankly, I’m grateful that Pablo Lopez is a Fresno Bee reporter, and not a judge, lawyer, or juror on any of the cases about which he reports.

You may recall that yesterday, I blogged about the incidents involving Judge Oppliger, who, while serving as a jury foreman, “arguably” engaged in misconduct by sending emails to 22 of his colleagues on the bench, including the judge who was presiding over the very trial where Judge Oppliger served as foreman.

Today, the Fresno Bee heralds yet another story of “juror misconduct.” Apparently, Pablo Lopez has just discovered that trial juries are made up of individuals called “jurors” and is amazed to learn they sometimes stray from the straight and narrow while serving. Thus, for two days in a row “juror misconduct” hits the front pages of the Fresno Bee.

But something seems different….

As Lopez reports it,

This is the second case of suspected juror misconduct this month in Fresno County. (Pablo Lopez, “Fresno juror accused of stealing trial evidence” (April 16, 2010) The Fresno Bee, emphasis added.)

[Note: Since I link the online story, I use the online date; the print edition, which I normally read, came out today; likewise, Judge Oppliger's story was in yesterday's print edition.]

The phrase “juror misconduct” is misleading here, however. Truth is, it’s apples to oranges when comparing what Judge Oppliger is alleged to have done with what juror Elizabeth Acuna did. For two reasons.

First, Judge Oppliger, while sitting as the jury foreman on a case, told his colleagues that he was enjoying the experience; Acuna admitted to stealing evidence (a video game console).

In other words, Judge Oppliger’s “misconduct” has not even been shown to be misconduct. It may be, as I suggested yesterday when I pointed out that there appears to be “something missing” when one reads the email samples currently publicly available. This is why, above, I put “arguably” in “scare quotes.” Yet even if there is something missing, that something may itself just be “more of the same”; in other words, “not misconduct.”

It is thus entirely possible — in fact, more likely — that Judge Oppliger did not violate the rules pertaining to jurors. As one of the emails from Judge Oppliger (rather condescendingly and ungrammatically) notes,

As we tell all of “them[,]” the only thing that cannot be discussed is “the case, or any of the people[,] or any subject involved in the case.” So while it behooves us to be responsible and even to error [sic] on the side o [sic] caution, other subjects such as the process fall outside the admonishment[,] but more importantly fall outside to scope of common sense.

And while the judge apparently ignored his own suggestion concerning what was and was not behooved, he is right. The judge’s lapse of judgment regarding the appearance of impropriety makes me uncomfortable, but what is known does not rise to the level of a violation of the rule(s).

The second reason is related to the first. The stories differ because of the purpose of the rules relating to juror conduct.

The ultimate goal is ensuring a fair trial to the accused person. (It remains for another post to discuss the mis-apprehension that the prosecution is entitled to a fair trial.) The ultimate goal of the rules regarding juror conduct is a fair and impartial jury; the proximate goal is to limit communications about the case because they are believed to impact the potential for reaching the ultimate goal.

Regarding the cases reported in each of the last two days by the Bee, Acuna alleges that she felt pressured to vote a particular way with respect to the verdict and this is why she stole evidence. Thus juror Acuna’s story potentially involves unfairness; juror/Judge Oppliger’s does not — at least, there is not any evidence that it does.

Sure, the defense attorneys in the case for which Judge Oppliger sat as a juror want there to be misconduct: if there were misconduct, they get a mulligan; a do-over. But as the old saying goes,

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

If worms carried shotguns, robins wouldn’t eat them.

As for me, and several other defense attorneys with whom I’ve spoken, we worry about the appearance of impropriety here. But our worries do not mean Judge Oppliger is guilty — or, by us at least, even suspected — of juror misconduct.

Mr. Lopez’s position as one of the primary authors of news stories covering criminal cases in the Fresno County Superior Court demands a responsible approach to the job. Unfortunately, there appears to be a reportorial pandemic that encourages sensationalism over responsibility, or even accuracy, these days. (As my wife recently reminded me when we were discussing integrity in modern media: “Walter Cronkite is dead.”)

And there’s certainly more of an “oh, wow!” factor, however small it may be, if one reminds readers that this isn’t the first instance of Jurors Gone Wild in Fresno County.

If Mr. Lopez wanted to perhaps write a real story regarding juror misconduct, he might do a little research on the seriousness of the problem, and quit trying to stir up excitement over the possibility that a sitting judge engaged in misconduct just to sell a story.

Maybe tomorrow Mr. Lopez can blow our minds again by pointing out that sometimes jurors make up their minds about the verdict before the trial is over. In the midst of the story, he can remind us that this isn’t the first instance of juror misconduct, by pointing out that one juror stole evidence during a trial while another juror — a sitting judge, no less! — told his colleagues he was enjoying the experience of performing his public duty and asked them for a list of jokes.

Seriously, though, if Pablo Lopez is going to do a series of “juror misconduct” stories comparing apples to oranges, he should at least point out that before passing on the question of guilt, his targets are entitled to a jury of their pears.

Too often, the stories relating to cases before our local courts are distorted — sometimes beyond recognition, according to lawyers who were actually present at the hearings — and the public has no way of knowing. The inaccuracies are not obvious; the stories, as written, are plausible.

This time — I hope! — Bee readers can see for themselves the mis-characterization.

Seeing it, I hope potential jurors on future cases reported by the Bee will remember the old adage: Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper.

But before I start, I want to offer a shout-out to a new blogger. So far as I know, he becomes the second law-focused blogger (after me) in Fresno.  (If anyone knows others, drop me their info and I may add them to my list.)  Terry stopped me on the way out of court today, although he got my name slightly wrong: he called me “Blogmeister.”  He said he wanted to start a blog, but wasn’t sure what to write about.  We talked awhile and I gave him a suggestion, saying I was planning to write about it also, and encouraged him to join the party.  Here’s the post he wrote after we talked.

Welcome, Terry!

With that out of the way, what follows is my riff on the story.

The Fresno Bee today reported that “Emails from judge/juror cause stir.”  The online version is here.

The front-page, top-of-the-fold, so-important-it-had-to-be-first story starts off with this:

Every juror knows the cardinal rule: Don’t discuss the case with anyone until deliberations.

Well, maybe.  (As in, maybe every juror knows “the cardinal rule.”  And, frankly, I’d rather “the cardinal rule” be “an accused person is innocent unless proven guilty, no matter what anyone tells you.”)

At any rate, the story goes on from there to talk about Judge Oppliger, a former chief homicide prosecutor who was inexplicably left sitting on the jury — along with a clerk for a federal judge and a forensic pathologist — and provides reason to believe he probably did not break the purported cardinal rule.

As the Fresno Bee reports, Judge Oppliger was clearly having fun on the jury panel and, in addition to becoming their leader, he apparently forged some new friendships.  That’s something every defense attorney hopes for when trying a case: to have a chief-homicide-prosecutor-turned-judge leading his pack of new friends to the verdict.

Which was, by the way, “guilty.”

At any rate, the judge appears to be not just having fun, but downright gleeful over his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  His emails show him joking around about serving on the jury — “livin’ the dream,” as he called it — but don’t appear to indicate anything untoward.  Frankly, I think any talk of a successful motion for new trial based solely on these emails may be a so-called “Hail Mary pass” and about as likely to succeed.

On the other hand, the PDF file containing the four emails raises more questions than it answers.  The four emails are dated and time-stamped “March 15, 2010 12:09 PM,” “March 16, 2010 3:51 PM,” “April 07, 2010 11:46 AM” and “April 12, 2010 1:33 PM.”

The emails make it clear that there’s something missing.

The “first” email contains the following text:

As we tell all of “them” the only thing that cannot be discussed is “the case, or any of the people or any subject involved in the case.”  So while it behooves us to be responsible and even to error [sic] on the side o [sic] caution, other subjects such as the process fall outside the admonishment but more importantly fall outside the scope of common sense.

Aside from the fact that at the time he wrote this, Judge Oppliger apparently forgot that — to paraphrase Pogo — he is them, the question that comes to my mind is “what caused him to write these words?”  The presence of “Re:” in the email subject line indicates that this is not really the “first” email in the chain.  Furthermore, this paragraph — the only paragraph in the email — does not obviously have anything to do with lunch!

Clearly there’s more, but what was it?  Who said it?

I’ll venture a guess:  Someone — most likely some other judge in the long list of judges in the “To” line — chastised him for something he wrote previously, something that hasn’t been released.  The “second” email, a part of which was quoted by the media, states:

Leave it to you guys to kill my dream of having come full circle.  I suspect the path suggested by [someone with apparently a 4- letter name which is blacked out] will take me into my retirement years.  But here I am livin’ the dream, jury duty with Mugridge and Jenkins!

What dream was killed?  Who is the mysterious 4-letter-named-redacted individual?  If it is one of the recipients of the emails, we appear to have 5 candidates, based on last names; two if the judges refer to one another by first names.  What path did he suggest?  Not sending emails while serving on juries?  If so, it appears to be a suggestion that will be ignored: prior to the start of jury deliberations, apparently, Judge Oppliger asked his fellow judges for a copy of the “top ten reasons that you know you have been on a jury to [sic] long when:” for his “friends.”

As I said, that email alone should strike fear into the heart of every defense attorney.

So now inquiring minds with FOIA requests want to know: where are the “missing” emails?  What information do they contain?

Why did the judge presiding over the trial, who was one of the recipients of the emails, not say anything about them until after the verdict?

And maybe two more: Does Judge Oppliger still feel that he’s “livin’ the dream”?  Or will his dream, in fact, turn out to be one helluva nightmare?

A couple of days ago, the Visalia Times-Delta, which is apparently a newspaper intended as a local daily equivalent to the National Enquirer, or some other piece-of-crap rag, trumpeted the complaint that a new “[l]aw frees some violent inmates.” Of course, you can’t completely blame the Times-Delta for the sensationalism on this story: it’s a slight modification of the headline accompanying the online version of the yellow journalism of the AP story.  Like the Bee story, by the way, the online AP story is dated one day earlier than the print version.

Both stories demonstrate the effects of budgetary meltdown; both hint, at least inchoately, at the cause: too many crimes (thus too many criminals) and all our money is being spent on prisons instead of providing education so people will be less likely to commit these crimes.  This is a non-sustainable path to anyone’s idea of a better society.  We simply cannot keep building and staffing prisons, no matter how badly we want to create new jobs.

The big problem is that the Slashbucklers, who aim to deal with the problem by increasing spending on law enforcement, crime labs and prisons (but not lawyers for the indigent or more judges) instead of schools and other “social” programs, are only going to make it worse.  Inevitably — and this is why I’m calling them Slashbucklers — they will bring all our systems crashing down.

Ironically, the Slashbucklers who will destroy us and our justice system are readily identifiable primarily because of their alleged “Law & Order” stance.  And, no, I’m not talking about the television show, although, perhaps not coincidentally, studies have shown frequent watchers of forensic and crime dramas “are more likely to overestimate the frequency of serious crimes” and “misperceive important facts about crime.”  (Amy Patterson Neubert, “Researchers rest their case: TV consumption predicts opinions about criminal justice system” (October 28, 2009) Purdue University News.)

“This kind of television viewing can lead to ‘mean world syndrome,’ where people start to think about the world as a scary place,” Sparks says. “Some people develop a fear of victimization, and this belief can affect their feelings of comfort and security.”  (Neubert, supra.)

The people I’m talking about are those who think the problem is that we need more funding for law enforcement, more funding for crime labs and then, just to make sure the cycle remains unbroken, more funding for prisons.  Like swashbucklers, slashbucklers see themselves as saviors, “rescuing society from the clutches of a dastardly villain,” the criminally-minded and “wasters” of government resources.

Forgive me, but I have to let myself be sidetracked here.  I can’t get over the irony of referring to forensic laboratories as “crime labs.”  If the Fresno Bee story is to be believed — and for a change it appears that perhaps it could be –

The stress and strain of trying to meet the demands of court has resulted in sacrificing quality for quanity…. This is evident throughout … and possibly provided the opportunity for evidence tampering and abuse of the evidence control system.

In other words, it really is a crime lab.  Just as pharmaceutical labs create more new drugs for the market, the crime lab creates more new crimes and criminals.

Meanwhile, at any rate, a little education would ameliorate all these problems.  But our society seems less and less willing to provide that.

I suppose there’s no surprise there: the less education people have, the less use they have for education.  And while I do not subscribe to the belief that all poor people are stupid, being stupid does predispose one to difficulties making a living wage.  It also makes one a crappy citizen, less able to participate — intelligently — in the democratic process.  (Unfortunately, it won’t stop them from voting.)

The less money people have, the less willing they are to see it taxed, even to improve educational systems.  Besides, locking people up creates more jobs (police officers, correctional officers, lawyers, judges, clerks, builders of prisons, planners, paper-makers, etc.), while simultaneously removing large numbers — almost two-and-one-half million in the United States — from the job market in which other stupid people compete.

So the circle is simultaneously completed and sustained.

One of these days, though — I’ll cling fervently to this hope until the day I die — we’re going to realize, as a society, that funding education is more productive than funding prisons and courts.  We’re going to stop the criminalization of normal primate behaviors that, left alone, would harm fewer people than they do when we criminalize them.  We’re going to find that this will reduce the need for crime labs, correctional officers, judges, lawyers and other wasted resources.

I want to see the day when teachers are paid more than police officers.  Where kids are taught to value learning and provided with the tools to learn.  Where we recognize that “Law & Order” are the natural consequence of producing people who can actually believe that they have something to lose by not committing crimes instead of creating situations in our communities, our prisons and in our ‘crime labs” that encourage their commission.

I’m looking forward to the day Slashbucklers are seen for what they are: poseurs who, rather than “rescuing society from the clutches of a dastardly villain,” are more often the villains from whom society needs rescuing.

The Letter, however, requires a response.

The basic background facts are these:

Five students [were] expelled from Central High School for cutting down two trees as a senior prank….

The students are all seniors and football players….

…[T]he prank was a case of “significant vandalism,” with estimated damage between $7,500 and $14,000.

The boys said they regret chopping down the trees, a prank meant to deprive junior classmates of shade.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” Jackson said. “It was a bad choice.”  (Tracy Correa, “Central High, expelled students waging legal battle” (March 16, 2010) FresnoBee.com.)

Now, at any given time, my criminal defense practice probably involves anywhere from 40% to 60% juvenile cases.  The majority of these cases come to me because of a limited contract I signed to accept a certain number of indigent cases per month.  I signed this contract a couple of years after I first started to practice law as a means of insuring that I could at least pay the rent on my office while I was trying to build my own practice; the steady income meant that even if I couldn’t help my wife with our family finances, I could at least cover the very basic needs for my office and stay in practice long enough to build a reputation and clientele.  With this contract, the juveniles I represent are typically from lower income families, which for some strange reason means I’m also usually representing minors from minority groups.

I can tell you that in my neck of the woods when a kid causes $7,500 to $14,000 damage to school property, he or she (although almost all of my clients are males) is going to be charged with at least one felony count and the minor is going to be in custody when I first meet him.  In many cases, that minor is going to remain in custody until the case is resolved.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, this case is being handled differently. Here, for example, is part of the letter that finally caused me to write about the case:

Enough already!  Why so many letters condemning the actions of five high school students who cut down two trees?  They have apologized, been punished and offered restitution.  But many of the letters still condemn their parents as well.  For what?  For standing up for their kids after the original school-dictated punishment was escalated?

Obviously, the youngsters made a terrible mistake.  But did it merit this level of denunciations and shaming? (Carolee Trefts, “Enough with the trees prank” in Letters to the Editor (March 29, 2010) Fresno Bee, p. B3, col. 3.)

The letter goes on to talk about Wall Street scandals, corrupt congress representatives and the war in Afghanistan, indicating that these are important problems which were allegedly ignored by those now complaining about these “youngsters.”

The “youngsters” are seniors at Central High School — at least one is 18 years old and thus eligible to be charged as an adult.  Normally, that’s exactly what would happen.  But these kids are not only not apparently charged with any crimes and are not in custody, but they are giving television interviews about the mean school district that expelled them and won’t let them return to class.

In addition, not insignificant segments of the community are rallying behind them and against the school district, as this Letter to the Editor shows.  An earlier story I read in the paper edition of the Bee indicated Fresno’s police chief believed it should be left to the school to handle.  When the school district violated a court order to allow the students to return, the police refused to enforce the court order.  (See the video accompanying this article.)

At first, I thought it must be that the kids were middle-class white kids, but I don’t think that’s it.  From what I can tell, two of the kids are white; the other three appear to be Hispanic.

Maybe it’s because the Hispanic kids are getting a free ride based on their association with the white kids.  After all, it’s normal for charges in Fresno to be determined by considering with whom the miscreants associate.  If, for example, you live in a neighborhood where some of the kids are gang members and you get into trouble with one of them, you’re almost certainly going to be facing a gang enhancement or independent gang charges; it’s a clear-cut case of guilt-by-association.  I suppose it’s possible, then, that what we have here is a case of exoneration or, — since those involved are at least being punished by the school system and by the fact that the parents have had to spend money on attorneys in the civil matter — at least a case where the police are staying out of it because white kids are involved.

Is it possible that the involvement of a couple of white kids can provide absolution for all?

Or maybe Fresnans are just feeling generous and compassionate these days.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think the kids should be charged with crimes.  It was — felony vandalism, yes — but as they said, it was also a stupid prank.  If you read my post from a couple weeks ago, you might guess that I’m in favor of handling the case as it is currently being handled.

Juveniles sometimes do stupid things.  More juvenile cases should be handled like this one.

These three concepts are at the core of the problem with our modern system of jurisprudence.  They aren’t alone in constituting that core — but, then, that actually just reinforces the point of one of them: Complexity.

Still, if we could get a grip on the proper balance of these three concepts, we’d go a long way towards improving our system.  We might even begin, again, to understand the meaning of Freedom.  Maybe even Justice.

That’s a pretty bold claim.  I’m going to disappoint not a few people because I’m not going to back it up to everyone’s satisfaction.  This is, after all, a blog; I’m doubtful you came here to read the tome I would have to write to dig very deeply into these issues.  For those who already think like I do, the concepts and even their interaction will not be controversial.  Maybe even those who do not share my thinking won’t find them so; they will merely disagree with my thesis that they are core to the undermining of Freedom and Justice and will think the only problem right now is that we still have a ways to go in the quest for perfection.

My central point is that our rules, our laws, our cases, by their very nature aim for some kind of simplicity.  What is wanted is a set of laws simple enough to understand and simple enough to apply, or use.  If the rules are not simple to understand, they will not serve to deter proscribed behavior because people won’t readily know what is proscribed.  Not being simple to apply, they will also create difficulties with prosecution, being subject both to the same difficulty — that people, including jurors, won’t readily know what is proscribed — and to abuse, from prosecutors who try to stretch them to cover all manner of circumstances for which they were not originally intended.

One example of this type of abuse is the 2008 case of Lori Drew, who was accused of creating a fake Facebook page which, according to the allegations, ultimately resulted in the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier.  As Harvard Law professor John Palfrey noted,

I think the danger of applying a statute in this way is that it could have unintended consequences.  [...] An application of a general statute like this might result in chilling a great deal of online speech and other freedom.

The statute Lori Drew was accused of violating, the crime she was accused of committing, was not really appropriately applied to her actual behavior.  Trying to make it apply, if it was ultimately successful, would put people on notice that they, too, risked conviction under this law for things they might say online, even though they intended no crime.

Another example, closer to where I practice criminal defense in Fresno, California, is the arrest and filing of charges against a woman who, in a fit of anger with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, scratched the car he drove.  The woman, a Fresno city fire inspector, had no idea that scratching a car for which she was one of the listed owners was a crime.  Sure, it would upset her husband (which is what she intended), but a person is not normally charged with a crime for damaging property she owns (which is probably why she didn’t think twice about doing it).  Her husband, a police officer, thought differently, as did his friends in the District Attorney’s Office: she was charged with a felony.  Police Chief Jerry Dyer stated,

Our investigation has revealed the charge of felony vandalism was the appropriate charge and is consistent with state law.  This charge was changed to the charge of misdemeanor vandalism at the preliminary hearing.

The charges were ultimately dismissed, but that doesn’t change the fact that Fresno’s police chief thought the charges were appropriate.  It was “consistent” with state law; meaning it was arguably possible to say that the elements of the crime one would have to prove to get a conviction could have been proven.  Granted, it’s idiocy to charge a woman — particularly with a felony — for damaging property for which she is listed as part-owner, but you could theoretically make the charge stick.

Such misapplication of the laws is increasingly common in a world where people in power have little regard for the principles of law, particularly when it gets in the way of what they want to do.  Combine this with the growing tendency of those in authority to arrest people simply for thinking they were citizens or visitors of a free country, and you’ve got a nightmare.

One of the things that makes it easier for these types of abuses to happen is this:  The world is a complex place, but our laws strive for simplicity and perfection.  We don’t want laws that are complicated by a large number of exceptions, even if those exceptions originate in common sense.  We want laws that say, “no weapons on school grounds,” and mistakenly believe that by taking away discretion we will stave off abuse.  After all, we think, if we allow some lower-, mid-, or even high-level individual to make exceptions, they might abuse this discretion and apply the law only to people they don’t like.  So “no weapons on school grounds” results in 6-year-old proud Cub Scouts being ordered to 45-days of reform school. And the only way to fix that is an emergency session of the school board.

We don’t want judges to judge, so Three Strikes laws ensure that a person stealing a few videotapes will get life in prison.  And, so far, nothing will fix that.

Three Strikes, of course, wasn’t born only out of a desire for simplicity.  The other prong, arguably more important, is perfection.  As Richard A. Gardner, M.D., discussing this problem in the context of accusations of child sex abuse, states,

A central cornerstone of our constitutional system is the principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty.  This is often stated as the dictum, “Rather 10 (or 100 or 1,000) guilty men go free than one innocent man be falsely convicted of a crime he did not commit.”  [...] These traditional constitutional safeguards are now being ignored.  Rather, judges now subscribe to the philosophy, “I’d rather be on the safe side,” and find defendants guilty with minimal evidence, even “evidence” provided by a three-year-old child who has been unrelentlessly programmed by her vengeful divorced mother to allege that she was sexually abused by her father.  One judge said to me, “If there is a scintilla of evidence that this man sexually abused this child, I will send him to jail for as many years as the law will allow.”  (Richard A. Gardner, M.D., True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse (1992) p. xxxii.)

The law should not allow — theoretically, it does not allow — anyone to be sent to jail on a scintilla of evidence.  The accusations of children with no other evidence at all should not result in a man dying in prison.  Yes, some accusations — and I’m not meaning to focus on child sex abuse here; it just happens I found the quote above while reading about it — are true; some are not.  Separating the friends of Doctorow from the Desperados is no easy task.  One size does not fit all.  Real judging and fact-finding involve complexity and with complexity comes the possibility of making mistakes.

But we seek perfection in our laws and perfection for us has come to mean “perfect protection,” not perfection in the sense of our laws being perfectly balanced to get the maximal protection for society balanced against maximal protection against the conviction of innocent people.  Instead, we don’t want to risk even one guilty person escaping, so we’ve abandoned the principle of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; a scintilla of evidence will do.

So what can we do about this?  How do we fix things?  The most disappointing aspect of this article is that I have to end by telling you that I don’t really know.  I know what I did about it: I gave up the idea of becoming a technology law attorney and became a criminal defense attorney.  We need people, I thought, to stand up against the insanity.  We need people to point out what I’m trying to point out in this article.  We need people who will work to turn things back, to remind us of the foundational principles that have been proven — over centuries of experimentation — to be necessary for anything remotely resembling real justice.

I know I’m not the only person trying to do this, although there are times when it feels that way.  But when I realized just how far wrong things had gone and how many people it would take to fix things, I knew this much: One of those people had to be me.