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TechnoratiPrisoners of Sentencing Politics
With odious sanctimony, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice released the annual State Department human rights report. She praised people around the world who work "to hold their leaders accountable and to achieve equal justice under the law."
The report knocked Russia's "selectivity in enforcement of the law," Burma's "abysmal" level of "indefinite detentions," Iran's "arbitrary arrests," Syria's trying of "political prisoners in criminal courts," and China's "20 percent increase over 2006 in convictions of citizens under China's overly broad state security law."In specific numbers, the report cited China's 1.8 million inmates and Russia's 889,600 prisoners, the latter of whom languish in "extremely harsh" and "overcrowded" facilities where "one in 25 was HIV-positive." Rice wrote in the report's preface, "Leaders who are insufficiently committed to reform may revert to authoritarian habits or take disastrous detours from the rule of law."
Missing from the State Department report was the disastrous detour of our own nation. Our inflexible reforms have for two decades turned nonviolent criminals into prisoners of politics.
The United States is the world's leading prison state. For the first time in our history, more than one out of every 100 adults is behind bars. We have 2.3 million people in jail or prison, according to a Pew Center on the States study released last month. Our rate of imprisonment easily beats second-place Russia and is six times the rate of China, seven times the rate of Germany or France, 10 times the rate of Italy, and 12 times the rate of Japan.
State spending on prisons has grown from $12 billion in 1987 to $49 billion last year. For that, we still have overcrowded prisons where the rate of HIV/AIDS is 2.5 times that of the general population.
The reason is not crime, not when our total levels declined in the 1990s to under those of the European Union, according to the United Nations. But the impact of mandatory federal and state drug laws enacted during the crack panic of the 1980s - and never changed when the panic over drug trade violence proved unjustified - continue to devastate communities and state budgets.
The most well known of those laws are the ones that treat possession of crack cocaine much more harshly than for being caught with powdered cocaine. The Supreme Court is taking an ever-dim view of the laws and the federal US Sentencing Commission has softened them somewhat. But there is no State Department concern for black men.
One in 15 adult black men are behind bars, compared with 1 in 106 adult white men. This is despite the fact that Americans consume illegal drugs at about their racial share of the population, that crack and powder are the same pharmacologically, and that the majority of the drug trade, including crack, is nonviolent. It is wrong that crack offenders, 70 percent of them nonviolent, spend on average 3 1/2 years more in jail (10.8 years to 7.2 years) than those convicted of powder offenses.
Of the presidential candidates, Republican John McCain is likely to march to President Bush's agenda. The Democrats are not unified in their desire to end this madness. In the 1990s, President Clinton wooed black votes, then sacrificed the black poor to his centrist politics, calling the 1994 crime bill that preserved the disparate laws the "smartest crime bill in the history of the United States."
Fourteen years later - years which include the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections that Democrats narrowly lost as 13 percent of black men could not vote because of convictions, according to the Sentencing Project - Clinton called the laws he maintained "a cancer." He pledged to "spend a significant portion of whatever life I've got left on the earth trying to fix this."
Then again, Clinton is still sacrificing black people, almost single-handedly inciting a stampede of undecided black voters from his wife's presidential campaign toward Barack Obama with ham-handed, racially tinged denigration of Obama.
Both Hillary Clinton and Obama say the laws are unfair. But only Obama approved of the recent decision by the bipartisan Sentencing Commission to "mitigate the unwarranted sentencing disparity" by granting mild retroactive reductions of crack sentences for mostly nonviolent offenders. Clinton's response was, "I have problems with retroactivity." As Condoleezza Rice rails about nations insufficiently committed to reform, we remain at high risk at home of staying on our disastrous detour.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
22 Comments so far
Show Alli'm certain you don't need convincing, the tale is personal and helps me place desperate sentences in context.
i also connect dots and am actively aware of the injustice in this world.
the poignant story is just that, a tale of reality. my point is we all have similar tales, not to convince one of moral truth (difficult task if people aren't willing to accept moral truth - i already know you have moral truth). it was just a personal reflection - it's the first image that comes to my mind realtive to the article (cocaine-sentencing) , people w/ faces, where i live, who are black going to prison. it's the tactile/visceral images of injustice that remind me these points are not abstrast.
yes bush is evil and the cancer of materialism/domination is rampant...
ya basta!
...peace...
IOWABLACKBIRD: Thanks for the poignant tale of today's street reality, but I require no convincing, and I am utterly aware of the racially disproportionate incarceration rate. The prison-industrial complex, like big pharma, like the military-industrial complex are several of the more prominent manifestations of the CANCER that has taken over this nation. I remember some Washington pundit stating there would no longer be any force to stand up to corporations once Bush was given the oval office. We know where the worship of mammon gets any society... cosmic rotor rooter is called for, as in America's moral soul requires an enema.
Siouxrose,
it's so twisted,
i'll share one personal story concerning this article....
"One in 15 adult black men are behind bars, compared with 1 in 106 adult white men. This is despite the fact that Americans consume illegal drugs at about their racial share of the population, that crack and powder are the same pharmacologically, and that the majority of the drug trade, including crack, is nonviolent. It is wrong that crack offenders, 70 percent of them nonviolent, spend on average 3 1/2 years more in jail (10.8 years to 7.2 years) than those convicted of powder offenses."
i live in a poor neighborhood, my apartment overlooks an intersection where there is a bus stop where a lot of criminal behavior occurs throughout the year (i've lived here 1 year). it picks up in the summer when pimps and prostitutes and crack dealers sell their services/products en mass. i am not a moralist and these people live in my neighborhood, like everyone else in our society they have mental illness that isn't addressed (huh - wonder why?). i try to be helpful w/out being judgmental.
of course theres a vice squad in the neighborhood -visible and invisible- (visible is bright white K9 on the side of the blue car, the invisible is 2 middle aged male buyers driving around in an older american car). the police tolerate the behavior on some nights and on other nights they casually arrest someone.
the neighborhood is very mixed racially (i was pleasantly surprised when i moved here) anyway, there isn't a lot of racial tension here people shop, socialize, have children with each other, speak kindly from the heart to each other, regardless of race......as a human i carefully observe people, (i can spend an hour on a bench in a park and just appreciate the human presence- life)
last summer, as i approached my front door - i noticed 6 people, 2 undercover cops that looked like marines - short hair cuts,gruff voices. the 2 officers dressed in blue very perky and punch happy. one african american woman about 27 sitting on the busstop bench looking down at the concrete enrapt in silence, and an older black man, about 50, was sitting on my step with a glass pipe next to him, he was staring at the skyscspe. i went up stairs, opened the window and watched how the police state works.
2 more police cars showed up, the man on the steps had about $200 in cash but no drugs - the cops tried coercing him verbally about the time in prison he was going to get, the other 'officer' was talking in lower tones to the woman at the bench who started screaming "this is my third strike ,i can't go to prison, i'm going to prison, i have kids, jesus i'm going to prison."
so there were now 6 police officers (5 men and one woman) who had blocked off a lane of the street, 2-3-4-5-6-7, 7 $20 dollar bags of crack came out of the woman's pocket and landed on the trunk of the cruiser on public display for pedestrians and cars passing. no money in her pockets however. so 25 minutes later, after some more interrogation and a few chemical tests - 2 more african americans are going to prison in iowa. i don't need TV to comprehend what is going on here. i haven't seen a single african american police officer in this city.
of course i have moral choices, i could have interceded on behalf of a local crack dealer and went to jail w/ them - i don't own a video camera, i'm poor. the police are instruments of the lawyers/the polticians - the brownshirts had bosses- and the brownshirts wear blue in america.....
...peace...
IOWABLACKBIRD: Thank you for the head's up. When any educated person faces what's been done in the NAME of law over the centuries, the only sane response is to NOT trust any authority. When a nation's policies are so nakedly bent on violence and aggression it holds no moral high ground from which to tell its citizens what they may and may not do in their own recreational free time. There is a strong analogy between the rigid conservative punitive take on the Bible and how US policy--foreign and domestic--is being implemented. I often see the connecting dots between subjects/articles on CD that perhaps others see as separate entities. The same dis-ease is at the root of much that ails us... and it starts with perception or consciousness.
"Missing from the State Department report was the disastrous detour of our own nation."
The U.S. State Department would never criticize its own failures on "human rights"! Their job is to convince U.S. citizens and the rest of the world that other countries around the globe are guilty of human rights crimes while U.S. human rights crimes are "justified", because we are the children of the true Christian Lord-God who would only punish those who are deserving of punishment. "We" are not, of course!
Sadly, Christians around the world will fall for this Bu$hit.
Siouxrose March 16th, 2008 9:31 am
right on..head on nail..exactly...!!!
guns, drugs, oil it's no wonder the president's crew is called skull and bones..
if people could grow their own opium, coca and marijuana plants, the peasants would actually have medicine.
it's rigged....big pharma controls global opium production, the market funnels the drugs to the developed world as the global poor suffer..
from the cannibus chronicles
http://the3lb.com/2007/10/24/worldwide-shortage-of-pain-killing-opiates/
"We inhabit a world of crazy skewered economics and market distortions. The hospitals of Rangoon tell their cancer patients they have no morphine to relieve the dreadful pain, and advise the relatives to buy opium on the plentiful black market.
Developing countries are home to 80% of the world's population, but they consume just 6% of the medication derived from the much-demonised opium poppy. If it is shocking that drug addicts in UK die from a heroin overdose, why are we not equally shocked that the west's obsession with banning narcotics has contributed to such dreadful deprivations that in the developing world, most patients with cancer, AIDS and other painful conditions live and die in agony.
While western politicians, and narcotics agents demand that poor farmers of the third world destroy their livelihoods, ie their coca and their opium crops, we allow the rich farmers of Tasmania to earn over $130 million dollars a year (1999 figure) from selling opium to pharmaceutical companies."
(same source)
"WHO experts say there is a strong demand for more opium for medicine. Senlis, a European research institute, estimates that meeting the global need for pain medications would require an additional 10,000 tons of opium a year - more than the combined output of Afghanistan and Burma.
The failure of opium repression surely demands some radical rethinking and debate about alternative drug strategies, that focus on health and harm reduction, rather than crude and ultimately futile repression.
Western government and narcotic agencies are sadly so immersed in the drug enforcement ideological straightjacket, that alternative policies and any mention of legalisation tends to be glibly dismissed out of hand as 'unrealistic' or 'unworkable,' closing the door on debate, before a serious debate can even begin."
of course the same international arm bending tactics are being used on the bolivian government, for allowing the use and cultivation of coca. a plant they've consumed for thousands of years.
it should be a human right to have access to any seed or plant. the governments of this world should not have the right to tell a doctor or a healer what is and what isn't acceptable 'medicine'. i hope this right will be endowed in our new bill of rights after the fall of our corporate fascist regime.
...peace....
IMPEACHBUSH: I don't think it's necessary for big pharma to get patents... the fact is, these street drugs make big pharma's cocktails unnecessary. POT was legal in the US and used to treat Tuburculosis until what was it, the l940's? The truth is, it's a peace plant, and probably makes people relatively satisfied with their lives as is. How can the advertising world, the messenger-whores to the corporations, sell all the things you don't need, if they can't create the false want for such items? Unhappy nervous people are probably the best class for endless shopping. I think the street drugs would complete with all their products, you know, the ones with names that simulate Greek states of satori, being marketed left and right for things like an allergy or a moving leg... and how 'bout them side effects? Of course lots of people use the damned things, then enough evidence accumulates for the DANGERS these lies to biology involve, and the products are pulled off the markets. The whole thing reminds me of Nader and the faulty car part... the drug companies in this case, do the numbers and figure they'll make X millions before the "guinea pig trial" done ON living populations reveals what their hardly peer-tested trials have a chance to evidence. All those diet drugs, all the fake sugar shit, the recent recall of menopausal hormone drugs, the recall of some heart medication, and you guys, please share your stories if you get to ride an erection for 4 hours... and how DARE a nation tell citizens what they can and cannot do when it still does executions, its hands stained with blood for so many wars of caprice, and guns worshipped as phallic extensions of macho power. PULLEEAASSEEE...
Doubtless, if Big Pharma could somehow figure out a way to patent cannabis, cocaine, and all the other so-called illegal drugs, they would now be legal.
skippyagogo41 March 15th, 2008 10:38 pm
i agree
we live in a society that is intolerant of behavior that is deviant to puritanical conceptions of good and evil. many in our prisons are imprisoned for victim less crimes (drug possession or distribution) and many of the cases in our lower courts involve people who've committed property crime or solicited a prostitute or used a prohibited substance. the film, sex-drugs-and democracy is a great film showing americans there is another approach. the dutch have approached these issues from another perspective.
a significant amount of the cocaine that floods the worlds market is from columbia, controlled by a right wing government that uses death squads and receives an inordinate amount of US military aid. and heroin production in afghanistan is flourishing - after 5-6 years of US intervention. heroin is now distributed in baghdad -nonexistent before US presence- and the esquire magazine article w/ admiral fallon last week mentioned a big drug (herion) problem in tehran. the US government controls the spiggots on the flows of cocaine and heroin and probably profits from corrupt smuggling of everything across various international borders (a nice slush fund for black ops).
yet it's citizens are not allowed to legally consume these products (or risk draconian consequences).our foreign policy and domestic policy mirror each other. funny how that happens...
UN Drug Bureaucracies, Demand Compliance With UN Charter 3/14/08
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/527/ngos_attack_UN_INCB_CND_ONDCP_human_rights_drugs
{Using the annual meeting of the United Nation's Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna as a springboard, an international consortium of drug policy, harm reduction, and human rights groups Monday slammed the UN drug bureaucracies for ignoring numerous, widespread human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of global drug prohibition. The UN must stand up for human rights in the drug control regime, the groups said.
The charge was made in a report released the same day,
"Recalibrating the Regime: The Need for a Human Rights-Based Approach to International Drug Policy," endorsed jointly by Human Rights Watch, the International Harm Reduction Association, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, and the Beckley Foundation Drug Policy Program. It was presented this week in Vienna during a discussion of the worldwide human rights impact of the drug war conducted as part of a series of events countering the official CND meeting.
The CND, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), are the three UN entities charged with enforcing global drug prohibition as enshrined in the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its two successor treaties. The CND was meeting this week to review whether the UN had met its 1998 10-year goal to achieve "measurable results" in the fight against drugs, including a "significant reduction" in the cultivation of cannabis, coca, and opium.}
notice the price of cocaine has dropped in the past 10 years, notice opium production is up (hence heroin prices are lower).
the answer is decriminalization of victim less crime, people have to find the intelligence and will to live, the government should provide free medicine (instead of prison) and counseling...i think many of us realize this...
another good link....http://www.idpc.info/
....peace....
Siouxrose;
If drugs and prostitution were legal and taxed your nation would be able to pay of its debt, not just deal with the deficit. First, you could free about half to 2/3rds of your prison population (how much does that cost every year?) then you'd be able to employ the police you have to actually catch the violent, the thieves, the corrupt and enforce those happy traffic laws. A good number of the unemployed would be working in nice little 'coffee' shops, and the use of pot and other drugs would actually go down. Teenagers wouldn't be as interested in pot and harder drugs as it wouldn't be the forbidden fruit any longer.
Won't happen tho, recruitment for the army would plummet, the gop wouldn't have the 'demon' issue to play any longer, and it would reinstate the voting rights of too many minorities. How else are they going to fill the jails if they can't bust people for weed...
My daughter cynically said that if drugs and porn were taxed, the US would be able to reverse its deficit. Food for thought...
Now that my daughter is 21 I know that if I am ever arrested for cannibis possession I will become an activist. I'm not yet out there daring to be arrested (and so feel somewhat cowardly) but I do know I'll be very vocal if it happens. Recently someone wrote a letter to the Bangor Daily News (Maine)about his pot use and why it should be legal. I admired that tremendously. One thing he said was "You'd be surprised how many of your friends and neighbors use marijuana because we are everywhere and causing no one any harm." Many older women in Maine smoke pot. We all so wish we could just grow it on our own properties. So, sorry WJM, that your life has been so disrupted and hurt by these ridiculous and political laws. Good luck to you.
I dated a guy with a drug problem in the Florida Keys. He kept telling me he believed his attorney was using cocaine. Sure enough, news hit the papers. The judge in his case was arrested for drunk driving and it was believed he also had drugs on him. No problem came out of that.
Years later I dated an attorney and he was a big time pot smoker. All his friends similarly used pot. I didn't understand how they could entertain the charade of the courtroom as users, knowing the "law" put others like them away.
What the drug war has done is the following:
A. set up a very inexpensive labor force which makes an end run around slavery and the Plantation system. Many states farm out prison labor for pennies on the dollar. Guess who profits?
B. Those who use drugs tend to probably be more liberal or progressive. Certainly that's true of pot. I remember standing on the lawn of the White House with at least 100 thousand protestors against the Vietnam War and God knows how many joints were going around as we happily burned effigies of Richard Nixon. I believe the same creeps who now have power (and identify with Nixon's authoritarian goals) realized the best way to disenfranchise a certain ilk that hated them and would therefore vote against them, was to make illegal their recreational drug of choice.
C. A lot of prison beds are now waiting for the intelligentsia, a/k/a dissidents.
It has nothing to do with sanity, justice or concern for public health! If it did, we would not see genetically modified food passing under the radar as "substantially equivalent" to the real thing. We would not be a nation that made guns, tobacco, porn and alcohol legal when all figure in crimes far more proportionally than does pot.
Pot is a peace plant, maybe even THE peace pipe. A nation that loves war, uses peaceful effeminate descriptions to belittle "real" men is going to make anything Yin, pacific and unifying anathema.
AND.... drum roll... the drug war, like the war on cancer, is now built into the GNP with its own infrastructure. Remember the analysis behing "Natural Capitalism," and what we count as profit in this land of the deranged and hardly free?
Thanks all for the kind thoughts. As to my finding something other than my hatred and anger to get me through this, I doubt it. If I don't keep these things going, I fall deeply into depression wich is the reason I started drinking 35 years ago in the first place. And the recent death of my closest friend (and last lady friend) doesn't help, either.
My real question is why do we allow the state and federal legislatures to practice medicine on the rest of us without a license? Isn't that still illegal? The VAST majority of them don't have anything approaching medical degrees, and still they are allowed to decide what we can and cannot use for medicinal reasons. I think some charges need to be filed over this and get this out of the criminal "just us" system. (BTW, I usually do use that term, thank you Richard Pryor).
Drug use, if seen by the authorities at all, should be seen as a health issue. It should NOT be a political or criminal issue. We've got nearly 100 years of proof that it's a dead end to allow this system to continue.
BTW, a federal judge who wrote a book called "Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out" has made the public statement that "This country never had a problem with any drug or substance until it had a minority to use it against". I tend to agree, and there is definite historical precedent to prove his point.
He also said that the "wrong message" crowd has it entirely wrong. He sees the message we send now is that we would rather tell our children "we would prefer that you died in prison or on the streets than to give you help if you need it, or leave you alone as an adult if you don't". He is right in that, as well. So much for compassion at any level, and for anyone, including your own children.
Again, thanks for the kind thoughts.
WJM:
I understand your frustration with the "justice" system here in the "land of the free." I too have had my run ins with "them" and found out real quickly that there are two systems of justice in this country...one for the rich and one for the rest of us. One very good example of this is the case involving a man named Richard Paey. Richard Paey is a chronic pain patient who suffers multiple schlerosis and also has severe back troubles. He is wheelchair bound. He was arrested by the DEA in Florida for possession with intent to distribute painkillers. These painkillers had been prescribed to him by a physician for his chronic pain. When he was arrested, he was charged with possession of Percocet. When they weighed the drug, they incuded the weight of the acemetophen (Tyenol)that is mixed with the narcotic medication to come up with a sufficient quantity to make him eligibe to include with intent to distribute to the charges. Further, he had been under surveillence by the DEA for several weeks, and even after the surveillence, they found no evidence he was trying to sell the drug. He went to trial and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Even the judge felt the sentence was unjust but had no leeway due to mandatory sentencing guidelines. Once in prison, Mr. Paey was fitted with a morphine pump which delivers more pain medicine than that which he was prescribed. He applied for a pardon before Jeb Bush's term for governor was up. Bush denied his pardon. Then...we have Rush Limbaugh. As everyone is well aware, Mr. Limbaugh was arrested in the State of Florida for doctor shopping along with possession of Oxycontin. He was getting the drug both by prescription and off the street through his housekeeper. Mr. Limbaugh got a slap on the wrist and was sent on his way.
WJM, I understand your anger. The "law" can break the law and get away with it (law enforcement.) In a court of law, if it boils down to who will the jury believe, they will believe law enforcement over a suspect. Further, it is okay for a cop to lie to you, but it is a crime if you lie to him.
You are also correct about this being a whiny, scared country. This country had been terrified of drugs ever since Harry Anslinger and William Randolf Hearst started their scare campaign of lies and pseudoscience way back in the day of alcohol prohibition (also brought about by a fear campaign by the Christian Temperance Movement.) The sheeple will be afraid of anything their government tells them to be afraid of. Look at how quickly everyone was willing to give up almost all of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights over the FEAR of terrorism.
Land of the Free and Home of the Brave? Hardly.
Politicians are always on the lookout for new natural drugs to prohibit. It's so easy and brings such rewards in the ballot box and in corporate bribes that what's a few million unproductive black men in prison?
"A crime should have a victim, and at this point, I am the only victim of what is going on. Cannabis has kept my depression under control, and kept me from the bottle of gin I climbed out of 23 years ago, and now they have taken that away from me and left me with nothing. My hatred and disgust of this are the only things that are keeping me going, at this point."
I believe I have a sense of what you're going through, WJM, and hope you'll find something more than hatred and disgust to keep you going.
I remember a couple of guys from my younger years who spent less time in prison for killing their wives than people now spend for having a small amount of cannabis in their possession.
WJM -- my feelings, bro, the only reason I didn't get screwed like you is that I had the good fortune to spend the most of my adult life in a country where possesion of cannibis is a misdemeanor, at least during the years where I could be found "in possesion".
The War on Drugs has always had a hidden (from the public eye -- as defined by the mass media) racist agenda. It's history.
WJM - I noticed you kept mis-spelling 'justice'. To them it is 'JUST US'.
It is generally accepted that in the US 1/4 of those behind bars are for drug offenses, 1/4 for drug related offenses, and 1/2 for other crimes. Strict enforcement of drug laws accounts for between 1/4 and 1/2 of all homicides in the US.
In other words, law enforcement (lawmakers, LE officers, and prosecutors) create ~1/2 of all crime. Jurors need to wake up and ask themselves what they are doing in a courtroom, since they are not trained to analyze evidence. Jurors are necessary to rein in bad judges, but unfortunately they are usually too intimidated to do so.
I've been saying for over 20 years that the republicans won't be happy until haof of us are in prison and the other half are watching that first half. It's their "full employment plan".
I myself am paying the price for using cannabis instead of prescription drugs, in a state where the voters have said to leave people like me alone for that very thing. As a result, I am on two years of probation, paying a third of what I make in a year in fines, having to piss in abottle for their amusement, and having to do 10 weeks of "anger management" classes. My driver's license has been suspended for 3 months to make sure that I can't even get to my job, and they are threatening me with 5 years of imprisonment if I don't pay them their extortion.
The US justice system has NOTHING to do with justice. If it did, they would have looked at the spirit of the law and the left me alone rather than screw me for thousands of dollars I don't have. But justice means money, now adays, and that is the republican way. The fact is that justice should NOT be relgated to screwing people for money, it should have to do with actual justice, which SHOULD be tempered by compassion.
A crime should have a victim, and at this point, I am the only victim of what is going on. Cannabis has kept my depression under control, and kept me from the bottle of gin I climbed out of 23 years ago, and now they have taken that away from me and left me with nothing. My hatred and disgust of this are the only things that are keeping me going, at this point.
In this situation, I've been lied to, lied about, threatened, intimidated, laughed at, and that is just the cops. The DA didn't give a damn about WHY I'd been doing cannabis, she just hit me with the most she could, and threatened me with 5 years imprisonment if I didn't take the plea bargain. I haven't been a problem to anyone for over 2 decades, until the state decided to make me one for themselves. And why on earth does this country fear a plant so much that it screwed with 823,000 of it's citizens in 2006 alone? So much for this being a courageous country that gives a damn about justice. It's a whiney, scared country that will screw whoever it can for money.
Justice, my ass. If there WERE justice in this country, W and Cheney would be in jail and I wouldn't be without my depression medication, trying to convince myself to get out of bed every morning.