Legal Commentary

Cook County May Provide Alternative to MJ Possession Arrests

By TChris

Laws that give the police discretion to write a noncriminal ticket instead of arresting individuals who possess an ounce or less of marijuana have become a commonplace compromise between drug warriors and policy realists. According to NORML's Allen St. Pierre, about a third of Americans live in a jurisdiction where the police have that discretion.

Cook County, Illinois may join that trend. A police sergeant in Chicago Heights, which enacted a similar ordinance last year, says that arrests for small amounts of weed are wasteful, given that 9 out of 10 cases get dismissed. Whether or not that figure is accurate, arrests for simple possession of marijuana are unfair to the arrested individuals and to the taxpayers who foot the bill.

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Arrests for possession of less than 30 ounces of marijuana account for more than 90 percent of simple possession arrests in Illinois last year (understandably, since possession of much more than an ounce tends to motivate hopeful felony arrests for "possession with intent to distribute.") The proposed ordinance would impose a $250 forfeiture for a first offense with escalating forfeitures for subsequent offenses.

Nationwide, nearly nine out of 10 marijuana arrests since 1965 have been for possession only, and the vast majority of those for amounts less than an ounce, according to the FBI's 2007 Uniform Crime Report.

The injustice of arresting anyone for pot possession is illustrated by this question: Why should anyone be arrested for possessing a plant that each of our last three presidents at some point smoked without incident?

It's easy to shrug away inequitable treatment as a random stroke of bad luck: Jimmy threw away the winning lottery ticket, Lucy lost an eye or had a stroke, Pat got busted for possession. Wow, glad that wasn't us, but sh*t happens.

But some sh*t shouldn't happen. Good public policy should not support or cause bad sh*t. If upwardly bound young men like Clinton and Bush and Obama could bogart an occasional doobie without fearing arrest and the public just doesn't care, why would it ever be our policy to arrest anyone for personal use marijuana possession?

Does this claim of injustice mean that we should not prosecute murderers who get caught when we know that other murderers are never captured? Don't be silly. The comparison is to our last three presidents, not to the homicidal public at large. Presidents are not usually murderers until after they take office.

Public indifference to marijuana possession in the assessment of presidential character reflects society's tolerance, if not acceptance, of recreational marijuana use. An arrest is a severe intrusion upon the right to privacy and often results in an immediate and complete, if temporary, deprivation of the right to liberty. It is unfair to subject anyone to that burden for indulging in behavior that doesn't offend the public.

Conservatives who will not yield to pleas for fairness are more receptive to budgetary arguments. The opportunity to squeeze government budgets is the force driving conservative interest in reforms they might otherwise resist as a matter of instinct. What's that saying about clouds and silver linings?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 20, 2009 (boomark / email).