Our System of Injustice

Not to turn this into a mirror site for The Agitator but Vig sent me all these links and in my current nearly brain dead state, it's better you get the news from a coherent source. Radley has more on the Atlanta granny who died in the SWAT team raid, here and here. The whole mess stinks like month old fish. Read his posts but basically they killed this woman based solely on a career felon's word that she possessed a kilo of cocaine and will justify it because they found less than two grams of pot in her house.

To balance this tragedy however, Radley also finds a SWAT team done right. Like Radley, I'm not against SWAT team use under appropriate circumstances. I believe in law and order, and I think most cops are good cops and want them to be protected. But it's also wrong for them to condone careless use of the teams by their silence or worse, covering up misconduct and shoddy police work.

Moving on, another lying informant was exposed in Texas. One had hoped that kind of injustice ended with Tulia, but at least this time it wasn't covered up.

And finally a a drug war roundup featuring some of the lesser known scandals of recent vintage including a kid who was suspended for putting a piece of Smarty candy up his nose, and calling it "nose candy." But he wasn't suspended for that. He was punished for not joining the principal's student narc force to rat out other students. Apparently the prinicpal princibly recruits from kids who are in trouble at school.

Radley also has links to another story of a ridiculous sentence for marijuana. This kid got 55 years for a small time marijuana deal because of mandatory sentencing. The judge publicly objected to having to impose the sentence and prosecutors from around the country wrote a amicus brief in protest. Via MAP, this graf from an editorial on Weldon Angelos says it all.

As the brief filed by 145 one-time prosecutors, including four former U.S. attorneys general, pointed out, Angelos' sentence is double what would be handed down to someone who was convicted of hijacking an airliner or being the kingpin behind a death-dealing drug cartel.

That's just not right.