Jury Nullification And The Heinious War On Drugs

The creators of the acclaimed “The Wire” have a jarring op-ed in TIME this week that is brief yet potent in its argument advocating a simple, ancient course of action for Americans with a conscience and a sense of reality can take to fight back.

Taking note of the brutal toll the failed war on drugs has taken on common citizens, society and even the government (especially the police, they argue for jury nullification in non-violent drug cases:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. 

If only more Americans thought like this, we might actually save tens of billions of dollars a year, help make some progress in the long struggle against extremist groups and transnational criminal organizations and save our civic souls in the process.

My awakening to the stupidity of the drug war started with reading, of all people, William F. Buckley (peace be unto him and his wife reunited in heaven I pray).  That was followed by the logical and civic arguments of people like George Will and Moises Naim, who have eviscerated the vapidness of the entire enterprise.  Only when I listened to street cops, detectives and the like who were reservists in the Navy and Marines did I really begin to grasp the total picture; how obsession with cheap drug busts and sensationalist raids ruined good police work and degraded good police skills and how soft and stupid drug dealers, runners and users were turned into hardened, remorseless criminals after several months and/or years in prison.

This stupidity rips apart our nation’s social fabric, as well as countless other nations from Brazil to Iran.  Its our problem, and simply locking away the users and dealers will not make it vanish.

(By the way, if you have not watched “The Wire”, you are missing out on arguably the finest American television series to ever grace the small screen.)