I feel sorry for her husband and kids who had no idea...but she needs to go back and pay her debt. Otherwise, justice means nothing. Run away and hide long enough and you are exonerateed? I think that would be a pretty slippery slope.
I don’t know. At that time there were very, very serious penalties for even the smallest amounts of drugs. She just might have been someone who was caught with a joint and got 20 years - I think that kind of thing happened at that time or earlier.
If she has managed to live a crime free and productive life for the past 32 years, the system can arguably count that as a successful rehabilitation, I suppose.
Is that not exactly what was in the defeated Immigration Bill? Evade being caught for 5 years and all is forgiven. Or am I wrong?
This is just government OCD vengeance. They blew thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars, state and federal, to make this useless "pinch".
A reasonable person would have assessed the situation and let it slide.
Yes, some call it the “Forgotten War” while most of us know it as “The War on Drugs.”
If we are to be victorious in the War on Drugs we need to drag this women by her hair all the way to GitMo and lock her there for the rest of her life.
Perhaps if we give her a little electric shock to sensitive parts of her body she will give up her fellow drug using friends from back in 1976 the year of our Bicentennial.
It’s a local story here. I live about three miles from the prison. She admits she was a user but a friend claimed she was dealing and she was caught with some a small amount of cocaine and a vial of morphine. She was told she would probably get a year’s probation if she plead guilty. Instead she was hit with 10-20 year sentence. Her grandfather and another relative helped her escape after serving one year.
On drug charges? Even pursuing her all those years has been a total waste of money. Mow we're going to take her out of a taxpaying job and warehouse her at government expense, taking up space that could have gone to an actual criminal. Maybe we should have a program to bill drug warriors for such antics.
You've been on the front lines here at Free Republic just as long as I have, Jeff. I usually agree with everything you post.
But I've been doing a lot of thinking about our "government" over the years, especially after the Clinton impeachment debacle.
The government had the perjuring, obstructing, tampering felon dead to rights, and they spent millions of our taxpayer dollars to do it - and they let him walk.
After that, I started looking at governmental claims about the need for "law enforcement" with skepticism.
Then I realized that our government at the local, state and national levels was ramming around, spending wads of our dough enforcing an ever-expanding litany of "laws" that the Founders would have gone bugeyed over.
Then I realized that the Founders didn't mean for the government to have a blank checkbook to pursue "criminals" that they were inventing daily - especially when the "laws" were applied subjectively in the end (see 1. Bill Clinton and 2. the illegals aliens, etc.).
Now I'm at the point where I'm REALLY skeptical when it comes to cases like this.
Somebody's got to start pointing out to people that just because the government CAN do it doesn't mean they SHOULD do it.