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"When this guy gets out in forty years, he's just gonna go back to doing the same thing all over again. Why not give him 400 years?"

I'd say one good reason not to waste the prison space that long on this guy is because there is a never ending supply of people willing to do what he did for the money. We don't have enough facts to know whether these two were just mules or if one or both of them actually owned the coke. One kilo is not that big of a haul so there is some likelihood that one or both of these guys at least had a substantial ownership interest in the coke. A kilo (1000 grams) can be had for $25,000 or less these days wholesale depending on where it's purchased. I live in a nearby southern state and people are buying "eight balls" (3.5 grams) of pretty pure coke here for $150 to $250 depending on who they know. Narcotics officers and informants are regularly paying around $600 a half ounce (14 grams) on the streets where I live.

Most of the people hauling large quantities of coke, or any other illegal drug for that matter, are "mules," people who are paid a fee for transporting the drugs but who do not own the drugs and who rarely know who actually does own them or who they are being sold to. The big dealers who can afford to traffic in large quantities always want a layer or two of folks below them who do not know who they are so that these people can't rat them out when they get caught. They actually expect to lose some loads and figure that in as a cost of doing business.

I live in a small county but police pull a few loads of coke every year weighing over a hundred pounds off the highway. Smaller loads of ten or twenty kilos are more the norm though. Marijuana loads of dozens or hundreds of pounds are not uncommon at all. A DEA agent told me a couple of weeks ago that there were tens of thousands of pounds of marijuana pulled off the highway in my county last year. Sometimes they don't even charge the mules if the mules can do a controlled delivery to wherever the drugs were going out east and help them bust the people who handle the mules, which might someday actually lead to a bust of the people who own the drugs. To avoid this now often there is a second vehicle that travels along with the vehicle carrying the drugs. The people in the clean car stay in contact with cell phones or radios and if the car with the drugs is stopped the clean car keeps going and warns the people who were supposed to take delivery of the drugs. The mules themselves are expendable, they are almost never even bailed out by the people who hire them and they certainly aren't provided with lawyers.

It may feel good to lock these people up for a long time, but people should know that what is happening is that the person getting sent to prison for all of these years is almost always a delivery driver who is getting paid a few thousand to run a load across the country. I'm not even sure how they pick these guys but often people who have never been in trouble before are recruited to make these runs. Sometimes they are not told what they are delivering. Usually they take no part in actually loading the drugs in the vehicle. They are either given the keys of a vehicle to drive or someone takes their vehicle for a few hours and brings it back later with drugs packed in a false compartment. Often even they know which drug they are carrying they don't know how much is there. Sometimes they are lied to and the vehicle is packed with coke or something else when they were told they were delivering marijuana. This happens because some don't want to deliver anything but pot or just as a way to cheat the driver because it usually pays more to haul coke than marijuana.

Something people should realize is that unfortunately there seems to be a never ending supply of people willing to do this sort of thing. They are promised a few thousand dollars or even that they'll get to keep the vehicle they are driving. Often times these are people in desperate financial condition and the promise of a few grand just to take a quick trip across the country is really tempting for them. The guys driving with large loads of pot are generally being paid between tow and ten thousand dollars, running cocaine pays even more.

I'm a public defender. At court tomorrow I'll be representing six people in three different cases involving alleged drug mules. These were all marijuana cases involving anywhere from thirty or so pounds on up to close to five hundred. All of these people will end up going to prison for a long time. All but one of my clients were passengers. All but one claim they knew nothing of the drugs in the trunk or in the false compartments. The one with the most is the one who sounds most believable because the pot was stashed in well hidden false compartments in a trailer he and another guy had been hired to haul out east. I have good evidence that he had been asked just the day before they set out on the trip to ride along by a shady guy he hadn't been working with long. They were hauling a legitimate load on the trailer as well and the guy swears to me he didn't know about the drugs or about the shady history of the other person in the truck who wanted him to trade off driving with him. My client intends to plead guilty though because he knows he'd get two or three times the prison sentence if a local jury found him guilty and a fine he would never be able to pay.

Juries here tend to find most all of these people guilty and max them out sentence-wise because of a strong drug war fervor people have here. I can't help but think it's all just a waste because drug prices have done nothing but gone down over the last couple of decades and so many times I have clients plead guilty who I suspect might actually not be guilty. I know most of them lie, but also I know that it makes sense that some of these people hired to run the drugs would bring helpers who didn't know about the drugs so they didn't have to split the big fee. Some of these people aren't exactly among the most honest folks you'd meet.