Radley Balko has a remarkable talent for finding interesting legal cases involving (potential) police abuse. This latest one is truly weird…and fascinating:
Earlier this year, police in Tallahassee, Florida raided the home of college student Rachel Hoffman, who friends say was a bit of a hippie-ish free spirit, and concede that she shared and sold small amounts of marijuana and MDMA within her social circle. Hoffman was at the time undergoing state-forced drug treatment after police found 20+ grams of marijuana in her car during a traffic stop. The raid turned up another five ounces of marijuana, plus six ecstasy pills and assorted pot-related paraphernalia.
From this, Tallahassee police apparently threatened Hoffman with prison time, then agreed to let her off easy if she’d become a police informant, and set up a deal with her supplier. They never informed Hoffman’s attorney or the state prosecutor of the arrangement. They wired Hoffman, and asked her to arrange to purchase 1,500 ecstasy pills, cocaine, and a gun—a deal that would have run well over ten thousand dollars. Hoffman’s friends and family have told me that all three purchases would also have been drastically out of character for her. Which means the dealers she was buying from were almost surely on to her.
Tallahassee police found Hoffman’s body last week. The first thing they did was call a press conference in which they blamed Hoffman for her own death, stating that the arrangement she made with the police was consistent with department protocol, and that she agreed to meet with the dealers in a different location than the one previously agreed upon.
This particular case appears — assuming this reporting is accurate — to have more to do with the stupidity of the police officers in question than anything else. But at the same time, it never ceases to amaze me how much energy, money, and resources law enforcement expends (at our direction) in the name of fighting petty drug users, especially pot smokers.
Though I don’t have any great ideas regarding hard drug policy, I don’t see how anyone can argue that drug users of Rachel Hoffman’s kind have done anything to deserve incarceration. And besides the financial costs of arresting, trying, and jailing them, there’s also the huge opportunity cost of tying up resources that could be better used elsewhere.
I’m curious what my co-bloggers think, as we don’t discuss drug policy very much.
Tom posted this at 4:10 PM HKT on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 as Uncategorized
William McGurn gives a great commencement address. A highlight:
Much of today’s silliness falls on sex. Chesterton once said that the job of the church is to teach the unpopular virtue. Let me rephrase that. I confess that I have never been able to track down the source where Chesterton gave that remark. So let me say that I am sure Chesterton would have said that the job of the church is to teach the unpopular virtue. And judging from the unpopularity of this message, we all appear to be doing a bang-up job.
So today I would like to talk to you frankly about sex.
If you’d like to finish was he was saying, go here. (H/T)
Hubbard posted this at 12:39 PM HKT on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 as The Right Words
The right, having focused on Reverend Wright more than any other campaign issue for weeks on end, has managed to set a precedent — from here on out I expect that the political press is going to seize on controversial statements by associates of candidates more than ever before, whether or not it’s even plausible that the candidate himself shares any of the opinions at issue.
I’ve got a piece up on the future of right-of-center journalism:
As the right’s echo chamber grows, the ideas that reverberate weaken. Ghettoizing smart writers within rally-the-base publications is something the left can afford, given the present media landscape, while the scarcity of journalists who grasp right-of-center ideas make their isolation particularly costly.
My solution involves Tom Wolfe.
conor friedersdorf posted this at 1:28 PM HKT on Monday, May 19th, 2008 as Uncategorized
In Douglas MacArthur’s famous testimony to Congress about the end of his service in east Asia, he commented that, if one were to compare Japan’s development toward self-government to a child’s development toward adulthood, the Japanese were about 12 years old. The Japanese didn’t much like that, and despite his previously high approval ratings, a pre-speech plan to build a large statue to him, and his foundational work on Japan’s postwar refounding, there’s not very much there to memorialize him.
If I were to base my opinion of the Iraqis off of stories like this, I’d say that they were about 3. And if I were to base my opinion of the whole Iraq endeavor off of a couple of paragraphs from the story, I’d think we were best off bombing the place to oblivion and leaving these people to their just desserts.
“I come before you here seeking your forgiveness,” Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond was quoted as saying. “In the most humble manner I look in your eyes today and I say please forgive me and my soldiers.”
The commander also read a letter of apology by the shooter, and another military official kissed a Quran and presented it to the tribal leaders, according to CNN.
So 19 Arab Muslims hijack planes and kill thousands of Americans, and I’m subjected to endless lectures from Arab groups on the evils of racial profiling; one American shoots holes in a Koran and an American soldier has to kiss a damned Koran? Bull Shiite.
Perhaps, ultimately, this is all worth it. But I often think that Victor Hanson is correct that the Arab world has much more to fear from the American street than we do from the Arab street. More temper tantrums like this, and we might end up spanking the little babies.
Apollo posted this at 1:19 AM HKT on Monday, May 19th, 2008 as Iraq
I haven’t been paying close attention lately and didn’t realize that Obama said this:
[If] we have a majority of pledged delegates, which is possible, then I think we can make a pretty strong claim that we have got the most runs and its the ninth inning and we have won.
I’m sure baseball fans know that teams never, ever lose after having more runs in the 9th inning.
Barry went to law school but he doesn’t know enough to not make analogies to things he doesn’t understand?
Apollo posted this at 11:07 PM HKT on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
The High Priest quotes Peggy Noonan, a quote that I wholeheartedly agree with, and then squanders his point with a comment only a self important asshole would make:
“What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn’t happen in 2005, and ‘06, and ‘07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration – over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government – has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They’re stuck.
Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party’s fortunes from the president’s. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn’t be left with a ruined “brand,” as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership,” – Peggy Noonan.
Some of us tried – and were vilified for it. Others chose to write books about “liberal fascism.” Over here! Over here! Shiny silver things!
Andrew, Andrew, Andrew – why do you make it so hard to agree with you?
Bush: “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”
Obama: “It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack.”
Bush: The White House denied Bush had targeted Obama.
Obama: “George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists…”
Then doesn’t it follow that the president wasn’t talking about Obama? That’s the only way that every sentence of the story could be correct. Of course, that would mean that Obama disingenuously took some of the president’s words and manufactured a controversy based purely on faked outrage.
If your stern determination not to talk to terrorists is known far and wide, why would you take offense when someone gave a speech about unspecified individuals who want to talk to terrorists? Especially when, both in America and Europe, there actually are quite a few people who think that we should talk with terrorists. If you’re not one of them, how is it an attack on you?
Of course, if you’ve based your campaign on giving Americans and foreigners alike the notion that you’re the most dovish candidate from the dovish party, that you’re willing to negotiate with foreign governments who sponsor terrorism, and that you’re going to run away from the most high profile war in 40 years, then every time someone mentions effete kowtowing, you have to go over the top in response. You’re merely for kowtowing; calling it effete kowtowing is a false political attack.
Apollo posted this at 1:34 PM HKT on Friday, May 16th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype
The Starbucks logo has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute….Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves, Slutbucks.
I think Slutbucks says it all.
I can’t imagine a man who doesn’t get excited by a drawing of a woman with scales on her legs. Well, maybe Hubbard, but I suspect this drawing has crossover appeal. Doesn’t that just look inviting? It’s perhaps the most erotic thing I’ve seen since the last time I read the phrase vagina dentata.
Apollo posted this at 10:32 PM HKT on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 as Kulturkampf
Of course, I’m an old fashioned type who thinks that you should probably share the beliefs of the church you join, so perhaps I’m not seeing this through the correct lens.
Apollo posted this at 10:14 PM HKT on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 as Audacity of Hype, Faith
I missed this article when it was published. Were its precedent followed everywhere the only people who wouldn’t be fired from white collar jobs would be a small, relatively old cohort that lacks the computer savvy to occasionally goof off.
conor friedersdorf posted this at 4:37 PM HKT on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 as Uncategorized
