[Michael.SF.]

I will admit that as I read this, my thought was that a lot people received some pretty harsh sentences for pot. The article has very few details on who was released, how long they had served and what the charges were.

The full list is available here.

Caution: The source has been shown to wholly unreliable, lies often and is purely politically motivated, none the less it is worth looking at the list.

[al baby]

He will before he is done will crank out tens of thousands more

[JimSEA]

Obama is playing to his tribe.

[patriotfury]

Apparently Dinesh D’Souza, and the 4 Americans being held in Iran didn’t have the same militant faith.

[Auntie Mame]

For another way to look at this let me tell you the story of my sister-in-law.

She started taking drugs when she was 13; she had horrendous parents and a terrible childhood. She continued to take drugs and probably sold some, completely under the radar, until she gave birth to her second child who was born with drugs (some sort of speed) in his system. It was her wake-up call. The state system took over and the baby was fostered out (I took him). She was not sent to state prison but had to work very hard to get her baby back, which she did when he was nine months old. She was (and still is) drug free.

Fast forward a year later after she finished up with drug court and got her baby back. Out of nowhere, she is arrested for a federal drug offense. It seems several years before all this happened she and a friend that lived clear across the country had come up with a plan where she would mail to her friend some speed for her friend to sell. She did it ONE time and decided it wasn’t a good idea and stopped.

A year later the friend was arrested by the feds on a completely unrelated drug charge. There’s a saying about the feds, something like, “give us three and you’ll go free.” What it means is if you turn in three of your friends, you’ll either go free or get a lighter sentence. So this friend turned in my sister-in-law for the aborted drug mailing fiasco.

Right when she’d put her life together this happens. To make a long story short, she ended up having to do two years in prison in a state called North Dakota. And she was lucky to only get two years. At the time she was at a point in her recovery where she wouldn’t lie, and certainly wouldn’t turn in anyone else to get a lighter sentence. She told me AA calls it “the wreckage of the past.”

It’s possible that some of these people may not be as bad as they appear.