[TKDietz]

You know what they do in my area? They let people buy better deals. It’s not fair, but the more money people come up with, especially these out of state drug mules, the better the deal they’re going to get. A lot of them can never come up with anything. A lot of them though can come up with a few grand if it will save them from a few years in prison. It won’t be the mule’s money generally. It will come from his brother, his mother, his aunt and/or uncle, friends, etc. Several people will pitch in to help the guy out. I’ve seen this happen a lot of times and in fact too many times I’ve had to be the one calling all these friends and relatives to coordinate the money raising efforts for my clients who are in jail. Sometimes they can buy their way out of going to prison, often they’ll just be buying a few years off of the sentence they would have gotten. Some of the money will go toward fines, and a lot of it will go as asset forfeitures to the prosecutor’s office and the law enforcement agency that made the bust, and often a good chunk of it is paid as “restitution” to our local Drug Task Force even though they aren’t the ones picking these guys off on the highway. These people usually have several months to raise the money. It takes that long to get a trial date after their arrest. If they still don’t have all the money in time to plead before the trial date, we can usually get the case continued a time or two to give them more time to raise money.

It does work out though that sometimes some fairly big drug dealer types get away with slaps on the wrists if they can come up with enough money, money that may very well be coming from organized crime, while at the same time we’ll see naive bumpkins who might be generally decent people who agreed to do something stupid because they were desperate for money will end up getting ungodly sentences because they can’t come up with any money. That isn’t fair. I’m a public defender though so my clients aren’t generally the ones coming up with huge sums of money to buy their way out of serious trouble. If they can come up with a few grand though I can get them pretty darned good deals. Our prosecutors know the score and will milk the rich cocaine smuggler with the high priced attorneys for an awful lot more money than he’ll get from my clients and he’s not going to give that guy who is forking out major cash a much better deal than he’s giving my client who just comes up with a few grand. That this type of person gets a better deal than my clients at all kind of sucks though, because odds are he’s a much bigger player in organized crime than my clients. In the grand scheme of things though these guys don’t matter to the prosecutor. They were just passing through. Whether they go away for a long time matters not to him. He’d rather they pay lots of money to supplement his budget and make him the hero with the county treasurer and the various law enforcement agencies who share in the wealth.

[monday]

“Whether they go away for a long time matters not to him. He’d rather they pay lots of money to supplement his budget and make him the hero with the county treasurer and the various law enforcement agencies who share in the wealth.”

This is the reason for the war on drugs. It’s not about keeping drugs off the streets, or any sort of justice. It’s about money and power. It corrupts DAs, judges, LEOs and politicians even if they aren’t directly on the take from drug syndicates, and many of them are. They all belong in jail more than the people they are prosecuting.