The Denver Post has begun a new series examining the drug war . Adam Brickner, director of Denver's Office of Drug Strategy, argues that substance abuse prevention must be the top priority:

Substance abuse and addiction not only cause significant harm to Colorado families, but also carry a hefty price tag for our community. Colorado loses roughly $4.4 billion annually and Denver loses $1.5 billion annually in productivity, medical costs and criminal justice costs, in addition to the incalculable toll in human suffering.

University of Denver law professor Robert Hardaway says we are stuck in a quagmire:

Every year, more than 400,000 Americans die as the result of tobacco use. Alcohol abuse results in the deaths of another 110,640 Americans, including 16,653 alcohol-related traffic deaths. Alcohol is a major factor in more than half of all homicides and rapes, 62 percent of assaults, and 30 percent of suicides. According to the Cato Institute, based on deaths per 100,000 users, "tobacco kills 650, alcohol 150, heroin 80, and cocaine 4." If an observer from another planet - say, Mars - were to analyze these statistics, he might be surprised to learn that out of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, only the others are criminalized in the United States.

Even more preposterous, says Hardaway, are the financial and other costs of the drug war:

• The expenditure of more than $80 billion annually to arrest and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of citizens, using large chunks of America's scarce jail capacity and necessitating the early release of murderers, rapists and child molesters.

• The imposition of thousands of raids, searches and wiretaps on American citizens;

• The forfeiture of billions of dollars of potential tax revenues to organized crime;

• The commission of more than one-fifth of all property crime in the United States, amounting to billions of dollars annually, by addicts seeking money for drugs made artificially expensive by criminalization;

• The corruption and undermining of our political system, particularly at the local level.

As for tangible results, Hardaway notes they are sorely lacking:

Public defenders: Overworked, Understaffed, Undaunted in Virginia. The situation is dismal in Georgia. It's even worse in Lousiana. Reform is needed in Alabama.

Friday, a judge in Louisiana appointed lawyers in four cases by looking in the phone book and making random calls.

The indigent defense system in this country needs a fix-- for starters, it needs adequate funding.

by TChris

When the Supreme Court banned executions of the mentally retarded in 2002, that should have been good news for Daryl Atkins. It was his case, after all, in which the Court ruled. But unsettled questions in the case have made it possible for the State of Virginia to continue its effort to impose the death penalty on Atkins.

The core issue in Atkins' case is whether Atkins is retarded. That should seem self-evident in light of Atkins' IQ of 59. But the prosecutor in Atkins' case has a novel theory: Atkins cannot be mentally retarded because the "truly mentally retarded" do not "commit these kinds of crimes."

Although some states have enacted statutes creating an objective standard -- prohibiting the execution of a defendant who has an IQ below 70 or 75 -- Virginia has enacted no standards. In Atkins' case, a jury will decide whether Atkins is retarded. The prosecution wants the jury to base its decision on the nature of Atkins' crime as well as his ability to recognize polysyllabic words and perform some basic tasks. The attempt to play to the jury's sympathy is transparent: by focusing on the facts of the murder rather than Atkins' IQ, the prosecutor hopes to distract the jury from the central question of Atkins' retardation.

The judge in Atkins' case has not yet decided what evidence the jury will be allowed to hear.

by TChris

Sheriff's deputies in Cleveland County, North Carolina arrested a 96 year old woman when, during the execution of a search warrant at the house she shared with her son, the deputies found crack cocaine in her wheelchair. The search was prompted, at least in part, by an informant's assertion that the woman had hidden drugs in her prosthetic leg during an earlier search.

The woman, who has no criminal record, denied knowledge of the drugs.

Lethal injection is widely believed to be the most humane way to kill. We've written several times about how the comination of drugs is proving to be anything but humane. Now, courts are joining the fray and beginning to give lethal injection a new look, including restrictions that prevent the execution witnesses from viewing the entire process:

The three-judge appeals court ruled that no lethal injection can go forward until the department revises its procedures for the news media and officials witnesses, or explains why its planned restrictions are needed. "Contemporary and evolving standards of decency and morality are not reliably developed in a vacuum and under sanitized conditions, but rather should be based on an appreciation by the community of just what is involved, in human terms and in terms of decency, in the state's putting a person to death," Appellate Division Judge Sylvia Pressler wrote.

....critics say the seemingly serene death that lethal injection induces can be an illusion. They contend the procedures are designed to keep witnesses from ever seeing the steps that are most likely to be botched -- notably the search for a suitable vein -- and that the drugs used make it impossible to tell whether the inmate is peacefully drifting into death or chemically paralyzed and unable to convey his agony.

Other problems include the "cut down procedure"--where, particularly in the case of former I-V addicts, there is a problem with finding a vein:

The cut-down procedure is archaic, cruel and inhumane," said Katherine Louise Lippert, a Birmingham lawyer who represents five Alabama physicians who filed a friend-of-the-court brief. "They're just carving up someone's arm until they find a vein."

There's lots more, go read the whole thing. [link via How Appealing]

1,200 pounds of marijuana and 2 pounds of cocaine are missing from the evidence room of the Volusia County Sheriff's Department in Florida.

Timothy W. Wallace, 47, the former evidence manager, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to traffic in cocaine and marijuana. He was released on $300,000 bail and could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Here's how it was discovered:

The Daytona Beach News Journal reports: Volusia County sheriff's investigators seized bricks of marijuana during several drug busts. Then they seized the marijuana again. It's the first time Florida law enforcement officials have investigated a case where seized drugs were put back on the street, they say. Sheriff's officials learned during the criminal investigation into the theft of half a million dollars' worth of drugs from their evidence compound that they seized the same narcotics more than once.

They sit in prison but their crime lab tests are flawed.

A year ago, the State Patrol conducted an internal audit of Arnold Melnikoff's work in 100 felony drug cases and found troubling flaws in 30. There were convictions in 17 cases for crimes ranging from simple possession to making meth. But none of those 22 defendants has been notified that the crime lab evidence used against them had been called into question, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has found.

The scathing April 2003 audit report described Melnikoff's drug-analysis work as "sloppy" and "built around speed and shortcuts." It also concluded that 14 of the 30 flawed drug cases needed to be retested because his data was "insufficient" to identify substances. But the lab was able to retest only four of the 14 cases because law enforcement agencies had discarded the evidence, Logan said.

It's not just Melnikoff's testing that is at issue. So is his court testimony:

A review of a dozen cases in which Melnikoff testified revealed "small misstatements" and "a tendency for conclusions to become stronger as the case developed, from notes to written report to testimony," according to the audit report.

It's inexusable to us that the state did not notify defense attorneys of the problems with Melnikoff's work.

The New York Times has an editorial, Creating the Next Crime Wave that debunks the theory that prosecutors and tough sentencing laws are responsible for the drop in crime rate:

The United States has the largest, most expensive and fastest-growing prison system in the world, and it may be unsustainable over the long run. Faced with a national price tag for corrections that exceeds $50 billion per year, states are being forced to re-evaluate the stiff sentencing policies that drove up the prison population to more than 2 million, from 200,000 three decades ago. In recent years, 25 states have eased sentencing policies and reinstated early release and treatment programs for drug offenders, now about a quarter of the nation's prisoners....Over the last decade, national crime rates fell sharply. Prosecutors and the police rushed to take credit, arguing that crime had gone down because criminals had been locked up.

The problem with this explanation is that crime went down just as much in states that did not adopt tough new policing and sentencing strategies as in states that embraced them. The emerging consensus is that mass incarceration accounts for only a fraction of the drop in violent crime. The strong economy of the 1990's clearly played a role, as did demographic factors — and the ending of the crack epidemic, aided by teenagers who shunned the drug after seeing parents and older siblings destroyed.

The Observer has more details from the Britons released from Guantanamo about their treatment. In interviews, the men discussed:

• How early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops who herded hundreds of prisoners into lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate. Iqbal described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and then only because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an action which killed yet more prisoners;

• The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates of Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;

• That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the Americans as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September hijackers Mohamed Atta. Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at the time, the Americans interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually all three falsely confessed. They were finally saved - at least on this occasion - by MI5, which came up with documentary evidence to show they had not left the UK;

• That their first interrogations by British investigators - from both MI5 and the SAS - took place in December 2001 and January 2002 when they were still being held at a detention camp in Afghanistan. Guns were held to their heads during their questioning in Afghanistan by American soldiers, and physical abuse and beatings were rife. At this point, after weeks of near starvation as prisoners of the Northern Alliance, all three men were close to death.

by TChris

For many years, the philosophy that prisons should be harshly punitive has prevailed in state governments. Year after year, legislatures sliced rehabilitative programs from state budgets as conservatives mocked a perceived liberal desire to coddle criminals. This bleak view of prison life has been embraced by most prison administrators, who seek only to run a prison with the ruthless efficiency of a cattle farm, albeit with fewer privileges for the human cattle.

Most wardens strive only to control and house their share of the nation's growing prison population, which, in the last 20-odd years, has quadrupled, to 2.1 million people. In California, the word ''rehabilitation'' was expunged from the penal code's mission statement in 1976. Since then, prison officials have been exhorted to punish, and they have fulfilled that mandate in new, highly secure prisons, devoid of anything that could lead to accusations of pampering inmates.

Read about San Quentin Warden Jeanne Woodford and her courageous effort to buck this dehumanizing trend. Her work reflects her belief that people can change if given some help, and that people will only perpetuate their past mistakes (at an increasing cost to everyone else) if society doesn't help them change. With little support from the state government, Woodford found ways to give meaning to the lives of San Quentin inmates.

The prison was bustling with purposeful activity. In the education building, inmates studied for their high-school equivalency examinations and college degrees. In factories, they learned to operate computer-controlled lathes, printing presses and milling machines. Two men pruned a Monterey Cypress tree in the chapel yard. Prisoners in a fathering course practiced reading Dr. Seuss to one another.

Woodford doesn't mind being judged "a naive, criminal-coddling do-gooder." Good for her. And good for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for selecting her to run the state's out-of-control Department of Corrections.

Spain has made five arrests in connection with the Madrid train bombings: three Morrocans and two Spaniards of Indian descent. They got a lead from a backpack with an unexploded bomb--and a cell phone-- left on one of the trains.

All the detentions were made "for presumed implication in the sale and falsification of the mobile phone and cards found in the bag that did not explode", Acebes said.

We have no idea if Spain has arrested the right people, but leaving a cellphone in a backpack is just plain felony stupid on the part of the bombers.

Update: An Arabic videotape has been found in which Al Qaeda takes responsibility:

Interior Minister Angel Acebes said a man identifying himself as the military spokesman of al-Qaida in Europe claimed the group was responsible for the bombings. "We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly 2 1/2 years after the attacks on New York and Washington," said the man, according to a government translation of the tape, which was recorded in Arabic. "It is a response to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies."

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Skippy has a roundup of what we're all writing about this weekend. How Appealing and Hamster have a roundup of the weekend news.

The new Vanity Fair has an article on political bloggers with a picture of Daily Kos at home in Berkely on his computer--and much deserved praise for him and other liberal bloggers. Unfortunately, it's not online. [Ed. link to Daily Kos fixed now.]

The group blog En Banc is no more, but Unlearned Hand , our favorite of the group, has resumed his individual blog.

Matthew Yglesias got a bloglift (y.w.c.t.p.) and is looking very good.

Atrios thinks that a major terror attack right before the elections would be good for Bush.

Last One Speaks has the latest on Drug Czar John Walters who is touring Nevada on the taxpayer's dime to lobby against a marijuana initiative.

Avedon Carol at Sideshow has the lowdown on why Ted Rall's cartoons got dropped by the New York Times.

Billmon at Whiskey Bar exposes the rankness of the Republican's attempts to smear Kerry as being the choice of terrorists.

World O'Crap and Xoverboard sum up the "bipartisan psychotic feeding frenzy that is Susan Lindauer, the woman accused of providing diplomatic services for Iraq."

Update: Trish Wilson writes about the need for emergency contraception and has a lot of info on how to get it.